Clash of Arms: A Romance

by John Bloundelle-Burton

"So," she said, "you are the man who found his way into this house by a road none have ever been known to travel before in our day. The man who thought to carry off your countrywoman--almost succeeded in doing so! Ciel! at least you are a brave one."

"I am the man," Andrew assented calmly; "who are you?"

It seemed, however, to be no part of her intention to tell him this, since, after casting another glance at his stretched-out form, she strode off to that part of the garret where the ladder, or steps, from below entered it, and, stooping down to the floor, picked up a jar of water and a platter of bread which she had placed there ere she advanced towards him. Then she returned to where he lay, put them by his side, and, taking up the other water-pitcher which he had drained when alone in the darkness, prepared to retire. But Andrew--who hoped that, even from this stern-looking woman (who was, he did not doubt, that custodian of Marion Wyatt of whom the peasant had spoken--the woman who had loved De Bois-Vallée's father and hated, in consequence, his mother) he might obtain some information as to what had been the conclusion of the events which had occurred in the hall--put out his hand as though to stop her going, and exclaimed:

"Tell me, I beseech you--as a woman yourself--what has befallen that countrywoman of mine. Is all well with her?"

Pausing in her withdrawal to gaze down at him, while the dark, piercing eyes looked into his, she made the enigmatic answer:

"As well as before. As well as it is ever like to be," then again directed her steps towards where the ladder descended from the room.

"And I----" he cried, endeavouring thereby to arrest her steps, "I--what is to be done to me--what attempted? Tell me that."

But she answered no more, continuing still upon her way to the steps. Yet, had Andrew been a timorous man who feared for whatever was about to befall him, he might have shuddered even as much as though she had told him he was to be done to death that very hour. For she turned her dark, grey-flecked head over her shoulder and looked at him with those piercing eyes--pausing in her progress as she did so--and in the eyes, nay! in the whole face, there was so mocking, devilish an expression--in the flickering rays of the lanthorn it seemed to be a grin!--that he divined there was no hope for him. That look told as plainly as a hundred words that he was doomed! Was in the hands of one who would forego nothing of the opportunity that had fallen in his way--and this woman knew it, gloated over it!

Yet, with what he felt to be his fate foretold by that baleful glance, this creature with her air of weird sardonic espièglerie fascinated him, even as the snake fascinates those who cannot fly from it, and, as she strode slowly towards the other end of the vast garret, he followed her with his eyes, unable to withdraw them. For it seemed to him that in her he saw a living semblance of those women, those Fates or Furies, of whom his mother and gentle, scholarly Philip had read to him in his wild boyish days; the dark and terrible women who held the web of men's lives in their hands and tore it as they listed. And he wondered if she, this woman, whose worn face told of fierce and stormy passions not yet spent--perhaps only subdued and half burnt out--might hold his fate. Was she to be the administrator of some terrible death marked out for him by the man in whose power he now was--did that hideous glance she had given him over her shoulder mean this, or mean, instead, that though death might not come to him at her hands she knew well how it must and would come?

Watching her still, half awed, half bewitched by her weirdness, he saw her suddenly stop ere she approached close to the ladder-head, gaze on the ground, then flash the lanthorn's miserable light on the spot at which she stared; next, stoop swiftly to the floor--supple now as a girl of twenty!--pick something up from the floor and, holding it in the palm of her disengaged hand, regard it by the lamp's gleam. And, if her face had stirred him with an undefined feeling of repulsion as she cast that leering, evil look over her shoulder, it horrified him now by the glance of hate it bore as she inspected the object in her hand.