The shadow of the Wolf

by R. Austin Freeman

“I will tell you, Mr. Varney,” she said. “You know how I came to marry Dan?”

“I think so,” he replied. “He never told me, but I guessed.”

“Well, if I had not married Dan, I should have married John Rodney. There was no engagement and nothing was said; but we were deeply attached to one another and we both understood. Then circumstances compelled me to marry Dan. Mr. Rodney knew what those circumstances were. He cherished no resentment against me. He did not even blame me. He has remained my friend ever since and he has formed no other attachment. I know that he has never forgotten what might have been, and neither have I. Need I say any more?”

Varney shook his head. “No,” he replied gruffly. “I understand.”

For some moments there was a deep silence in the room. Margaret glanced timidly at her companion, shocked at the sudden change in his appearance. In a moment all the enthusiasm, the eager vivacity had died out of his face, leaving it aged, drawn and haggard. He had understood; and his heart was filled with black despair. At a word all his glorious dream-castles had come crashing down, leaving the world that had been so sunny a waste of dust and ashes. So he sat for a while silent, motionless, stunned by the suddenness of the calamity. At length he rose and began, in a dull, automatic way to collect his etchings and bestow them in his portfolio. When he had secured them and tied the ribbons of the portfolio, he turned to Margaret and standing before her looked earnestly in her face.

“Good-bye, Maggie,” he said in a strange, muffled voice; “I expect I shan’t see you again for some time.”

She stood up, and with a little smothered sob, held out her hand. He took it in both of his and, stooping, kissed it reverently. “Good-bye again,” he said, still holding her hand. “Don’t be unhappy about me. It couldn’t be helped. I shall often think of you and of how sweet you have been to me to-day; and I shall hope to hear soon that you have got your freedom. And I do hope to God that Rodney will make you happy. I think he will. He is a good fellow, an honest man and a gentleman. He is worthy of you and I wish you both long years of happiness.”

He kissed her hand once more and then, releasing it, made his way gropingly out into the hall and to the door. She followed him with the tears streaming down her face and watched him, as she had watched him once before, descending the stairs. At the landing he turned and waved his hand; and even as she returned his greeting he was gone. She went back to the drawing-room still weeping silently, very sad at heart at this half-foreseen tragedy. For the time being, she could see, Varney was a broken man. He had come full of hope and he had gone away in despair; and something seemed to hint—it may have been the valedictory tone of his last words—that she had looked on him for the last time; that the final wave of his hand was a last farewell.

Meanwhile Varney, possessed by a wild unrest, hurried through the streets, yearning, like a wounded animal, for the solitude of his lair. He wanted to shut himself in his studio and be alone with his misery. Presently he hailed a taxicab and from its window gazed out impatiently to measure its progress. Soon it drew up at the familiar entry, and when he had paid the driver he darted in and shut the door; but hardly had he attained the sanctuary that he had longed for than the same unrest began to engender a longing to escape. Up and down the studio he paced, letting the unbidden thoughts surge chaotically through his mind, mingling the troubled past with the future of his dreams—the sunny future that might have been—and this with the empty reality that lay before him.

On the wall he had pinned an early proof of the aquatint that Thorndyke had liked and that he himself rather liked. He had done it partly from bravado and partly as a memorial of the event that had set both him and Maggie free. Presently he halted before it and let it set the tune to his meditations. There was the lighthouse looking over the fog-bank just as it had looked on him when he was washing the blood-stain from the deck. By that time Purcell was overboard, at the bottom of the sea. His oppressor was gone. His life was now his own; and her life was her own.