The Judgment House Part 50

"All the world knows that. If you have anything of his gift, we shall not fail. We shall feel that we are doing something for our country--and, oh, so much for ourselves! And we shall be near our men.

Tynie and Ruddy Byng will be out there, and we shall be ready for anything if necessary. But Rudyard, will he approve?" She held up the cheque.

Jasmine made a pa.s.sionate gesture. "There are times when we must do what something in us tells us to do, no matter what the consequences. I am myself. I am not a slave. If I take my own way in the pleasures of life, why should I not take it in the duties and the business of life?"

Her eyes took on a look of abstraction, and her small hand closed on the large, capable hand of her friend. "Isn't work the secret of life?

My grandfather used to say it was. Always, always, he used to say to me, 'Do something, Jasmine. Find a work to do, and do it. Make the world look at you, not for what you seem to be, but for what you do.

Work cures nearly every illness and nearly every trouble'--that is what he said. And I must work or go mad. I tell you I must work, Alice. We will work together out there where great battles will be fought."

A sob caught her in the throat, and Alice Tynemouth wrapped her round with tender arms. "It will do you good, darling," she said, softly. "It will help you through--through it all, whatever it is."

For an instant Jasmine felt that she must empty out her heart; tell the inner tale of her struggle; but the instant of weakness pa.s.sed as suddenly as it came, and she only said--repeating Alice Tynemouth's words: "Yes, through it all, through it all, whatever it is." Then she added: "I want to do something big. I can, I can. I want to get out of this into the open world. I want to fight. I want to balance things somehow--inside myself...."

All at once she became very quiet. "But we must do business like business people. This money: there must be a small committee of business men, who--"

Alice Tynemouth finished the sentence for her. "Who are not Climbers?"

"Yes. But the whole organization must be done by ourselves--all the practical, unfinancial work. The committee will only be like careful trustees."

There was a new light in Jasmine's eyes. She felt for the moment that life did not end in a cul de sac. She knew that now she had found a way for Rudyard and herself to separate without disgrace, without humiliation to him. She could see a few steps ahead. When she gave Lablanche instructions to put out her clothes a little while before, she did not know what she was going to do; but now she knew. She knew how she could make it easier for Rudyard when the inevitable hour came,--and it was here--which should see the end of their life together. He need not now sacrifice himself so much for her sake.

She wanted to be alone, and, as if divining her thought, Lady Tynemouth embraced her, and a moment later there was no sound in the room save the ticking of the clock and the crackle of the fire.

How silent it was! The world seemed very far away. Peace seemed to have taken possession of the place, and Jasmine's stillness as she sat by the fire staring into the embers was a part of it. So lost was she that she was not conscious of an opening door and of a footstep. She was roused by a low voice.

"Jasmine!"

She did not start. It was as though there had come a call, for which she had waited long, and she appeared to respond slowly to it, as one would to a summons to the scaffold. There was no outward agitation now, there was only a cold stillness which seemed little to belong to the dainty figure which had ever been more like a decoration than a living utility in the scheme of things. The crisis had come which she had dreaded yet invited--that talk which they two must have before they went their different ways. She had never looked Rudyard in the eyes direct since the day when Adrian Fellowes died. They had met, but never quite alone; always with some one present, either the servants or some other. Now they were face to face.

On Rudyard's lips was a faint smile, but it lacked the old bonhomie which was part of his natural equipment; and there were still sharp, haggard traces of the agitation which had accompanied the expulsion of Krool.

For an instant the idea possessed her that she would tell him everything there was to tell, and face the consequences, no matter what they might be. It was not in her nature to do things by halves, and since catastrophe was come, her will was to drink the whole cup to the dregs. She did not want to spare herself. Behind it all lay something of that terrible wilfulness which had controlled her life so far. It was the unlovely soul of a great pride. She did not want to be forgiven for anything. She did not want to be condoned. There was a spirit of defiance which refused to accept favours, preferring punishment to the pity or the pardon which stooped to make it easier for her. It was a dangerous pride, and in the mood of it she might throw away everything, with an abandonment and recklessness only known to such pa.s.sionate natures.

The mood came on her all at once as she stood and looked at Rudyard.

She read, or she thought she read in his eyes, in his smile, the superior spirit condescending to magnanimity, to compa.s.sion; and her whole nature was instantly up in arms. She almost longed on the instant to strip herself bare, as it were, and let him see her as she really was, or as, in her despair, she thought she really was. The mood in which she had talked to Lady Tynemouth was gone, and in its place a spirit of revolt was at work. A certain sullenness which Rudyard and no one else had ever seen came into her eyes, and her lips became white with an ominous determination. She forgot him and all that he would suffer if she told him the whole truth; and the whole truth would, in her pa.s.sion, become far more than the truth: she was again the egoist, the centre of the universe. What happened to her was the only thing which mattered in all the world. So it had ever been; and her beauty and her wit and her youth and the habit of being spoiled had made it all possible, without those rebuffs and that confusion which fate provides sooner or later for the egoist.

"Well," she said, sharply, "say what you wish to say. You have wanted to say it badly. I am ready."

He was stunned by what seemed to him the anger and the repugnance in her tone.

"You remember you asked me to come, Jasmine, when you took the sjambok from me."

He nodded towards the table where it lay, then went forward and picked it up, his face hardening as he did so.

Like a pendulum her mood swung back. By accident he had said the one thing which could have moved her, changed her at the moment. The savage side of him appealed to her. What he lacked in brilliance and the lighter gifts of raillery and eloquence and mental give-and-take, he had balanced by his natural forces--from the power-house, as she had called it long ago. Pity, solicitude, the forced smile, magnanimity, she did not want in this black mood. They would have made her cruelly audacious, and her temper would have known no license; but now, suddenly, she had a vision of him as he stamped down the staircase, his coat off, laying the sjambok on the shoulders of the man who had injured her so, who hated her so, and had done so over all the years.

It appealed to her.

In her heart of hearts she was sure he had done it directly or indirectly for her sake; and that was infinitely more to her than that he should stoop from the heights to pick her up. He was what he was because Heaven had made him so; and she was what she was because Heaven had forgotten to make her otherwise; and he could not know or understand how she came to do things that he would not do. But she could know and understand why his hand fell on Krool like that of Cain on Abel. She softened, changed at once.

"Yes, I remember," she said. "I've been upset. Krool was insolent, and I ordered him to go. He would not."

"I've been a fool to keep him all these years. I didn't know what he was--a traitor, the slimmest of the slim, a real Hottentot-Boer. I was pigheaded about him, because he seemed to care so much about me. That counts for much with the most of us."

"Alice Tynemouth saw a policeman help him into a cab in Piccadilly and take him away. Will there be trouble?"

A grim look crossed his face. "I think not," he responded. "There are reasons. He has been stealing information for years, and sending it to Kruger, he and--"

He stopped short, and into his face came a look of sullen reticence.

"Yes, he and--and some one else? Who else?" Her face was white. She had a sudden intuition.

He met her eyes. "Adrian Fellowes--what Fellowes knew, Krool knew, and one way or another, by one means or another, Fellowes knew a great deal."

The knowledge of Adrian Fellowes' treachery and its full significance had hardly come home to him, even when he punished Krool, so shaken was he by the fact that the half-caste had been false to him. Afterwards, however, as the Partners all talked together up-stairs, the enormity of the dead man's crime had fastened on him, and his brain had been stunned by the terrible thought that directly or indirectly Jasmine had abetted the crime. Things he had talked over with her, and with no one else, had got to Kruger's knowledge, as the information from South Africa showed. She had at least been indiscreet, had talked to Fellowes with some freedom or he could not have known what he did. But directly, knowingly abetted Fellowes? Of course, she had not done that; but her foolish confidences had abetted treachery, had wronged him, had helped to destroy his plans, had injured England.

He had savagely punished Krool for insolence to her and for his treachery, but a new feeling had grown up in him in the last half-hour.

Under the open taunts of his colleagues, a deep resentment had taken possession of him that his work, so hard to do, so important and critical, should have been circ.u.mvented by the indiscretions of his wife.

Upon her now this announcement came with crus.h.i.+ng force. Adrian Fellowes had gained from her--she knew it all too well now--that which had injured her husband; from which, at any rate, he ought to have been immune. Her face flushed with a resentment far greater than that of Rudyard's, and it was heightened by a humiliation which overwhelmed her. She had been but a tool in every sense, she, Jasmine Byng, one who ruled, had been used like a--she could not form the comparison in her mind--by a dependent, a hanger-on of her husband's bounty; and it was through her, originally, that he had been given a real chance in life by Rudyard.

"I am sorry," she said, calmly, as soon as she could get her voice. "I was the means of your employing him."

"That did not matter," he said, rather nervously. "There was no harm in that, unless you knew his character before he came to me."

"You think I did?"

"I cannot think so. It would have been too ruthless--too wicked."

She saw his suffering, and it touched her. "Of course I did not know that he could do such a thing--so shameless. He was a low coward. He did not deserve decent burial," she added. "He had good fortune to die as he did."

"How did he die?" Rudyard asked her, with a face so unlike what it had always been, so changed by agitation, that it scarcely seemed his. His eyes were fixed on hers.

She met them resolutely. Did he ask her in order to see if she had any suspicion of himself? Had he done it? If he had, there would be some mitigation of her suffering. Or was it Ian Stafford who had done it?

One or the other--but which?

"He died without being made to suffer," she said. "Most people who do wrong have to suffer."

"But they live on," he said, bitterly.

"That is no great advantage unless you want to live," she replied. "Do you know how he died?" she added, after a moment, with sharp scrutiny.

He shook his head and returned her scrutiny with added poignancy. "It does not matter. He ceases to do any more harm. He did enough."

"Yes, quite enough," she said, with a withered look, and going over to her writing-table, stood looking at him questioningly. He did not speak again, however.

Presently she said, very quietly, "I am going away."

"I do not understand."

"I am going to work."