"Anyhow," he said, "there's no harm in trying. See him and make one more appeal. I'll cut around here and have a try at climbing to the top of the cliff. There's a path by the back way. The hotel proprietor spoke enough English to tell me there was a small chapel on the top of this cliff over our heads, and a wonderful view, from Toulon to Marseilles—Try it, Muriel—for my sake. I want to pay up. I don't pretend to be happy, but I want to pay up. So long! Good luck. And never say die!"
He rattled out his careless words so swiftly that she could not answer. He scarcely reached their end before he raised his hat and darted down the steps.
She saw him disappear, and waited. She waited until von Klausen's young head and shoulders came above the steps.
"Franz!" she cried.
The Austrian hurried to her.
Stainton did not look back at them. He turned up the path that led around the rock, moving with the elastic step of a schoolboy going from his classroom to the playground. He almost ran up the wooded steep behind the cliff, and he was conscious of a familiar pride in the ease with which he made his way over the rapidly increasing angle of the mountainside. When he passed the timber line and came to the walls of bare rock along which the narrowed path wound more and more dangerously, his breath was shorter than it used to be in his climbing days in the Rockies, yet he moved swiftly. He ran along ledges that would make most men's heads swim, spurned stones that slipped beneath him, leaped from towering rocks to rocks that towered over hidden descents. He was driven by a mighty exaltation, by a stinging delight in the approach of finality. He was drunk with the most potent of sensations: the sensation that nothing could matter, that the worst to befall him was the measure of his desire. He was about to make the great sacrifice. He was about to fling himself from the cliff at the beetling chapel of St. Pilon. By ending his life in such a way that Muriel would suppose that end an accident, he was, for the woman he loved, about to court the death that he had all his life feared.
He reached the mountain's bald top, and there flamed about him the panorama of the Chaîne de la Sainte Baume from Toulon to Marseilles, from the mountains to the sea. It was blue, intensely blue, under a full sun and in an air vibrant with health. The sky was a vivid blue, cloudless, the distant water was a blue that danced before his eyes. The summits of stone that fell away at his feet among cliffs and precipices were grey-blue. The deep valleys' greens were bluish green, and here and there, where he could barely distinguish the cottage of a forester or the hut of a charcoal-burner, there rose, incapable of attaining half-way to the awful height on which he stood, lazy wreaths of a smoke that was blue.
He was alone. Ahead of him and ten feet above stood the chapel: a single room, its third side open to the air, its walls seeming to totter on the edge of a tremendous nothingness. He walked resolutely around the chapel; found that, in reality, there was a ledge a yard wide between it and the drop; looked over and then instinctively fell on his knees and so upon his belly, thrusting his head over the awful descent.
He saw below him—far, far below him, past perpendicular walls of blue rock—the narrow projection that was the parapet before the grotto of the Magdalen. He saw two figures beside the parapet. He saw, beyond the parapet, the precipice continue to the primæval forest, the trees of which presented a blurred mass of lancelike points to receive him. Beyond them he could not see. He grew dizzy; his stomach writhed.
He shut his eyes, but he saw more clearly with his eyes shut than open. He saw his father drawing the razor across his throat, and that father after the razor had been drawn across his throat. He saw his own body below there, this trembling body that he had so cared for, so believed in, impaled, broken, torn, crushed, an unrecognisable, pulpy inhuman thing....