The Devil's Garden

by W. B. Maxwell

And it seemed to him that, look where one pleased, one could see the real work of the finger of God. It had been giving him, William Dale, faint imperceptible pushes for fifteen years, and see now at the end where it had pushed him. First it had pushed him upward, higher and higher, to a position of conspicuous pride, to the topmost summit of a fair mountain, where he could look round and say, "I have all that I pined for. This is the world's castle, and I am the king of the castle." Then it had begun to push him down the other side of this mountain, the dark side, the side that was always in shadow, downward and still downward to the miasmic unhealthy plain where all was rankness, downward to the level of corruption and death. Yes, it had brought him, the bold, proud law-maker, down and down till he stood no higher than the victim of his law.

He remembered the common phrase—so often employed by himself—comparing mice with men. Am I a man or a mouse? And it seemed that no cat had ever played with a mouse as the Infinite Ruling Power of the universe had been playing with the man William Dale. He had been allowed to break loose, to frisk and jump, to fancy he was free to run right round the earth if he wished to do so; and all the while he had truly been a prisoner, the helpless prey of his captor, held close to the place of ultimate doom.

If he had been promptly convicted and hanged, it would have been no punishment at all compared with what was happening now. The long delay was the essential part of the punishment, and of the lesson. The fact that no one suspected his crime had given him the period of agonized suspense, with all those dream-torments, the fear of death which was worse than death itself.

He thought of all the things that had appeared to be blind chances but were really stern decrees. The true function of the money that came from the dead man's hand was to keep him always on the rack of memory. And with the aid of the money he had been made to move a little nearer to the site of his crime. He had been made to buy Bates' business so that he might dwell right up against Hadleigh Wood, see it every day from his windows, hear it whispering to him every night when he was not asleep and dreaming of it. But for that apparently lucky chance of Mr. Bates' retirement, he would have gone to some splendid new country, and severing ties of locality, would have shattered associations of ideas, and been able to forget. He had made up his mind to go to one of the Australian colonies and make a fresh start there. But that didn't match with God's intentions by any manner of means.

His thoughts returned to Norah, and here again—here more plainly than anywhere else—he saw the work of God. It was wonderful and awe-inspiring how God had selected the instrument that should destroy him. He felt that he could have resisted the charms of any other girl in the world except this one. In mysterious ways Norah's fascination was potent over him, while it might have been quite feeble in its effects with regard to other men. But for Dale she represented the solid embodiment of imagined seductiveness, allurement, supreme feminine charm; that flicker of wild blood in her was to him an essential attraction, and it linked itself inexplicably with the amorous reveries of far-off days when, young and free and wild himself, he loved the woodland glades instead of hating them.

The selected instrument—Yes, she was the one girl on earth who could have been safely employed to achieve God's double purpose of overwhelming him with base passion and bringing his lesson home to him simultaneously. No other girl that ever was born could have aroused such desire in him, and yet have slipped unscathed out of his arms at the very moment when the consummation of his sin seemed unavoidable. Any other girl must herself have been sacrificed in destroying him; only the child who had frightened him in the wood could instantaneously, by a few unconsidered words, have taken all the fire out of him and changed his heart to a lump of ice. That was a stroke of the Master: most Godlike in its care for the innocent and its confusion of the guilty.

He remembered how grievously he had dreaded this child—the little black-haired elf that had seen him hiding. It had made him shiver to think of her—the small woodland demon, the devil's spy whose lisping treble might be distinct and loud enough to utter his death sentence. A thousand times he had wondered about her—thinking: "She is growing up. She belongs here;" looking in the faces of cottagers' children and asking himself: "Are you she? Or you? Or you?" Then he had left off thinking about her.

She had come into his life again, into his very home, and he had never once asked himself: "Is Norah she?" No, because God would not allow him to do so; it had suited God's purpose to paralyze the outlet of all natural thought in that direction. So she grew tall and strong under his eyes—the dreaded imp of the wood eating his food, squatting at his own fireside; changing into the imagined nymph of the wood that he had seen only in dreams; becoming the very spirit of the wood—yes, the wood's avenging spirit.

He moved from his recumbent position, sat up, and drew out Norah's letter from the breast pocket of his jacket. He read her letter again, and his sadness and despair deepened. There was no revolt now; he felt nothing but black misery. He thought: "I used to fear that she would be the means of my death, and now death is coming from her. This letter is my death-warrant."

There was no other way out of his troubles. Life had become unendurable; he could not go on with it. And this thought became now a fixed determination. He must copy the example of other and better men; he must do for himself, as old Bates and many others had done for themselves when they found their lives too hard for them.