Footsteps of Fate Part 20

"There, there, there," he growled; and each time a sledge-hammer blow fell on Bertie. "There, there, there"--on his nose, his eyes, his mouth, his forehead--and the blows resounded dully on his skull, as if on metal. A red mist clouded Westhove's sight; everything was red-purple, scarlet, vermilion. A blood-stained medley circled round him like whirling wheels, and through that strange crimson halo a distorted face grinned up at him under the pounding of his fist. The corners of the room swam in red, as if they were full of tangible red terror, whirling, whirling round him--a purple dizziness, a scarlet madness, a nightmare bathed in blood;... and his blows fell fast and steadily--"there--there--there"--and his left hand closed tighter on the throat below that face--

The door flew open, and she, Eva, rushed up to him through the red mist, parting it, dispelling it by the swift actuality of her appearance.

"Frank, Frank!" she screamed. "Stop, I entreat you! Stop! You are murdering him!"

He let his arm drop, and looked at her as in a dream. She tried to drag him back, to get him away from the battered body, to which he clung in his fury like a vampire.

"Leave him, Frank, I beseech you; let him stand up. Do not kill him. I was outside, and I was frightened. I did not understand, because you were speaking Dutch. Great heavens! What have you done to him? Look, look! What a state he is in!"

Frank had risen to his feet, dazed by that red frenzy; he had to lean on the table.

"I have given him what he deserved--I have thrashed him, and I will do it again!"

He was on the point of falling on the foe once more, with that devilish grin on his face and that brutal thirst still choking him.

"Frank, no. Frank!" cried Eva, clinging to him with both hands. "For G.o.d's sake be satisfied! Look at him! oh, look at him!"

"Well, then, let him get up," Frank snarled. "He may get up. Get up, wretch, at once; get up!"

He gave him a kick--and a second--and a third--to make him rise. But Van Maeren did not move.

"Great G.o.d! only look at him," said Eva, kneeling down by the body.

"Look--don't you see?" She turned to Frank, and he, as if awaking from his dream of blood, did see now, and saw with horror. There it lay: the legs and arms convulsed and writhing, the body breathlessly still in the loose, light-hued summer suit; and the face a mask of blue and green and violet, stained with purplish black, which oozed from ears and nose and mouth, trickling down, clammy and dark, drop by drop, on to the carpet.

One eye was a shapeless ma.s.s, half pulp and jelly; the other stared out of the oval socket like a large, dull, melancholy opal. The throat looked as though it had a very broad purple band round it. And as they stood gazing down at the features it seemed that they were swelling, swelling to a sickening, unrecognisable deformity.

Out of doors the storm of rain had not ceased. There they stood, staring at the horror that lay bleeding and motionless on the ground before them; a leaden silence within, and without the falling torrent, an endless, endless plash.

Eva, kneeling by Bertie's side, and shuddering with terror, had felt his heart, had listened with her ear against the breathless trunk--close to the dreadful thing, to make sure--and she had got up again quaking, had very softly stepped back from it, her eyes still directed on it, and now stood clinging against Frank, as if she would become one with him in her agony of fear.

"Frank," she gasped. "G.o.d have mercy! Frank! He is dead! Let us go--let us go; let us fly!"

"Is he dead?" asked Westhove, dully.. His mind was beginning to wake--a faint dawn like murky daybreak. He released himself from her grasp; knelt down, listened, felt, thought vaguely of fetching a doctor, of remedies; and then he added huskily, certain, indeed, of what he said, but quite uncertain of what he should do.

"Yes, he is dead--he is dead. What can I--?"

Eva still hung on to him, imploring him to fly, to escape. But his mind was gradually getting clearer, daylight s.h.i.+ning in on his bewilderment; he freed himself from her embrace, and tried to go; his hand was already on the door-handle.

"Frank, Frank!" she shrieked, for she saw that he meant to abandon her.

"Hus.h.!.+" he whispered, with a finger on his lips. "Stay here; stay and watch him. I will come back."

And he went. She would have followed him, have clung to him in an agony of terror, but he had already shut the door behind him, and her trembling knees could scarcely carry her. She sat down by the body, s.h.i.+vering miserably. There it was--the swollen, bruised, and purple face, sad, and sickening in the diffused afternoon light which came in obliquely through the curtain of rain. Every breath stuck in her throat; she was dying for air, and longed to open the window, being closer to that than to the door.

But she dared not; for outside, through the dim square panes, she saw the tragical sky covered with driving slate-coloured piles of cloud, and the rain falling in a perfect deluge, and the sea dark and ominous as an imminent threat, the raging foam gleaming through a shroud of pouring water.

"Molde, Molde!" she exclaimed, icy-cold with terrible remembrance. "It is the sky of Molde, the fjord of Molde! That was where I first felt it.

Oh, G.o.d! Help, help!"

And she fell senseless on the floor.

PART V.

I.

Since that day of terror two years had elapsed, years of silent endurance for them both; each suffering alone. For they were parted; with only the solace of a brief meeting now and then, when she could go and see him where he was spending those two years, the days slowly dragging past, in the prison among the sand-hills.

He had given himself up at once to the police of Scheveningen, as if he were walking in his sleep, and had been taken to the House of Detention.

He had stood his trial--it had lasted six weeks--a short time, his lawyer had said to comfort him, because there was no mystery to clear up; the murder was proved to a demonstration, beyond the shadow of a doubt, to be the result of a quarrel. This was evident also from the evidence of Miss Rhodes, who had stated that the criminal himself had not at first understood that his friend was dead, for that he had immediately after kicked him two or three times to rouse him, thinking he was only in a state of collapse; and that this had taken place in her presence. The trial was watched with interest by the public; and their sympathy was aroused when the purchase of the letters came out through the evidence of Sir Archibald and his daughter, confirmed by William, whose presence was secured by diplomatic interference. There were no difficulties; six weeks settled everything. Frank was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, and the case was not taken to a higher court.

He had spent the time, day after day, in a waking dream of gloomy lucidity, with always, always the sinister vision of that writhing body, and the horror of that dreadful battered face before his eyes. He had felt it glide over the pages of his book when he tried to read, among the letters he traced when he tried to write,--what he scarcely knew, fragments of an account of his travels through America and Australia--a melancholy employment and full of pain, since every word reminded him of the murdered man who had been his constant companion. And when he did nothing, but gazed in dreary reverie out of the window of his cell, there, just below, and not very far away, he could see the villa where they had dwelt together and where he had done the deed, with a glimmer of the sea, a s.h.i.+ning grey streak; and in fancy he could smell the briny scent, as in the days when he had spent hour after hour, with his feet on the bal.u.s.trade--the hours which, as they crept on, though he knew it not, were bringing inevitable doom on them both, every moment nearer. So it never left him; it haunted him incessantly.

Eva had entreated her father to remain at the Hague during all this terrible time, and Sir Archibald had consented, fearing for his daughter's health. Her natural sweet equanimity had given way to a fitful nervousness, which tormented her with hallucinations, visions of thunder and of blood. So they had settled in the Van Stolk Park, and all through Frank's imprisonment she had been able to see him from time to time, coming home more exhausted from each visit, in despair over his melancholy, however she might try to encourage him with hopes for the future, later on, when he should be free. She herself could hope, nay, lived only on hope; controlling her excitability under the yoke of patience, and of her confidence in something brighter which might come into her life, by-and-by, when Frank was free. A new life! Oh, for a new life! and her spirits danced at the thought--and new happiness! Great G.o.d! some happiness! She did not herself understand how she could still hope, since she had known so much of life and of men, and since she had lived through that fearful experience; but she would not think of it, and in the distant future she saw everything fair and good. Even her hallucinations did not destroy her hopefulness; though dreading them, she regarded them as a recurring malady of the brain, which would presently depart of itself. She could even smile as she sat dreaming in the pale light of a starlit summer evening, the calendar in her hand, on which she scratched through each day as it died, with a gold pencil-case which she had bought on purpose and used for nothing else, wearing it in a bracelet;--struck it out, with a glad, firm stroke, as bringing her nearer to the blissful future. And she would even let the days pa.s.s without erasing them severally, that she might have the joy at the end of a week of making six or seven strokes, one after another, in a luxury of antic.i.p.ation.

II.

And now, long as they had been, the days had all stolen by--all, one after another, beyond recall. The past was more and more the past, and would for ever remain so; it would never come back to them, she thought, never haunt them more with hideous memories. She grew calmer; her nervousness diminished, and something like peace came upon her in her pa.s.sionate longing for the happy future; for she was going to be happy with Frank.

She was now in London again with her father, living very quietly; still feeling the past, in spite of her present gladness, still conscious of what had been, in all its misery and its horror. Frank, too, was in London, in a poorly paid place as a.s.sistant overseer in some engineering works, the only opening he could find by the help of his old connections; jumping at it, indeed, in consideration of his antecedents, of which he had no cause to be proud. By-and-by he should get something better, something more suited to his attainments. And he took up his studies again to refresh his technical knowledge, which had grown somewhat rusty.

Sir Archibald had grown much older, and was crippled by attacks of rheumatism; but he still sat poring over his heraldic studies. Living in Holland for his daughter's sake, he had too long been out of his own circle of acquaintance and groove of habit; and though he had from time to time, in a fit of childish temper, expressed his vexation at Eva's becoming the wife of a murderer, he now agreed to everything, shrinking from the world and troubling himself about nothing; only craving to be left undisturbed in the apathy of his old age. "He knew nothing about it; old men know nothing of such things. The young people might please themselves; they always knew best and must have their own way." So he grumbled on, apparently indifferent, but glad at heart that Eva should marry Frank, since Frank, if he could be violent, was good at heart; and Eva would be well cared for, and he himself would have some one to bear him company in his own house--yes, yes, a little company.

Frank and Eva met but rarely during the week, for he was busy even in the evenings, but they saw each other regularly on Sundays. And Eva had the whole week in which to think over the Sunday when she had last seen him, and she tried to recall every word that he had said, every look he had given her. On these treasures she lived all the week. She had never loved him so dearly as now, when crus.h.i.+ng depression weighed on him, which she longed to lighten by the solace of her love. There was something motherly in her feeling for him, as though his sufferings had made a child of him, needing a tenderer regard than of yore. She had loved him then for the mysterious charm, as it seemed to her, of the contrast between his feeble gentleness and his powerful physique; and now it was no more than a higher development of the same charm, since she saw the stalwart, strong man suffering so pitiably under the memory of what he had gone through, and lacking the energy to rise superior to it and begin life anew. But this want of vigour did not discourage her in her hopes for the future; on the contrary, she loved him for his weakness, while regarding this as singular and incomprehensible in herself; dreaming over it in her solitude, or smiling with gladness.

For she, as a woman, in spite of her nervous, visionary temperament, could resolutely forget the past, bravely go forward to meet the future, compelling happiness to come to her by her sweet patience and elastic constancy. Had not all the woes of the past lain outside them both? Had not Frank done penance enough for his fit of rage to hold up his head again now? Oh, they would soon have got over it completely; they would insist on being happy, and she would cure him of everything like heart-sickness.

Thus she hoped on, a long, long time, refusing at first to acknowledge that he grew more melancholy and gloomy, sinking into deeper and deeper dejection under his burden. But at last she was compelled to see it, could no longer blind herself. She could not help seeing that he sat speechless when she talked so hopefully, listened in silence to her cheerful words and bright illusions, saying nothing, and sometimes closing his eyes with a sigh which he tried to suppress. She could not deceive herself; her sanguine moods aroused in him only an echo of despair.

And when one day this was suddenly clear to her, she felt, suddenly too, that her nervous fears had worn her out; that she was sad and ill; that her courage, her hopes, her illusions were sinking down, down, deeper and deeper. A bitterness as of wormwood rose up in her, tainting everything; she flung herself on her bed, in her loneliness, heart-broken, in utter anguish, and cursed her life, cursed G.o.d, in helpless woe.

III.

Then, circ.u.mstances occurred which, in spite of all this, led to its being settled that they were to be married in quite a short time--in about six weeks. Frank had been helped by some of his old friends to obtain an appointment as engineer in a great Glasgow firm; Eva was to have her mother's fortune; there were no difficulties in the way.

Frank now always spent the whole of Sunday at Sir Archibald's house. He came to lunch, sitting as silent as ever, and after lunch they were usually left to themselves. At first the hours flew by, sped by Eva's day dreams, though she was still, and in spite of herself, somewhat nervous; they would discuss various matters and even read together. But then for some little time minute would link itself to minute, while they did nothing but sit side by side on a deep sofa, holding each other's hands, and gazing into vacancy. And a moment came when they could no longer endure that grasp--no longer dared. The image of Bertie, with his purple, blood-stained face, would rise up between them; their hands parted--they were both thinking of the dead. Eva felt as if she had been an accomplice in the deed. As it grew darker intolerable misery would so overpower her that it seemed as though she must suffocate; then they would throw the windows open and stand for a long, long time to refresh themselves in the cool air, looking out over the Park in the gathering gloom. She listened in dread to Frank's breath as it came and went.