In Kings' Byways Part 16

"Twenty crowns a year," he said. "Then listen. I will give you two hundred crowns for this house--for one night."

"For this house for one night?" she repeated, thinking she had not heard aright.

"For this house, for one night!" he answered.

Then she understood. She was quick-witted, she had lived long in the house and knew it. Without more she knew that G.o.d or the devil had put that which she sought into her hands; and her first impulse was to pure joy. The thirst for vengeance welled up, hot and resistless. Now she could be avenged on all; on the hard-hearted tyrant who had rejected her prayer, on the sleek dames who would point the finger at her child, on the smug town that had looked askance at her all these years--that had set her beyond the pale of its dull grovelling pleasures, and shut her up in that lonely House on the Wall! Now--now she had it in her hand to take tenfold for one. Her face so shone at the thought that the man watching her felt a touch of misgiving; though he was of the boldest or he had not been there on that errand.

"When?" she said. "When?"

"To-morrow night," he answered. And then, leaning forward, and speaking lightly but in a low voice, he went on, "It is a simple matter. All you have to do is to find a lodging and begone from here by sunset, leaving the door on the latch. No more; for the money it shall be paid to you, half to-night and half the day after to-morrow."

"I want no money," she said.

"No money?" he exclaimed incredulously.

"No, no money," she answered, in a tone and with a look that silenced him.

"But you will do it?" he said, almost with timidity.

"I will do it," she answered. "At sunset to-morrow you will find the door on the latch and the house empty. After that see that you do your part!"

His eyes lightened. "Have no fear," he said grimly. "But mark one thing, mistress," he continued. "It is an odd thing to do for nothing."

"That is my business!" she cried, with a flash of rage.

He had been about to warn her that during the next twenty-four hours she would be watched, and that on the least sign of a message pa.s.sing between her and those in authority the plot would be abandoned. But at that look he held his peace, said curtly that it was a bargain then; and in a twinkling he was gone, leaving her--leaving her alone with her secret.

Yet for a time it was not of that or of her vengeance that she thought.

Her mind was busy with the years of solitude and estrangement she had pa.s.sed in that house and that room; with the depression that little by little had sapped her husband's strength and hope, with the slow decay of their goods, their cheerfulness, even the artistic joys that had at first upheld them; with the aloofness that had doomed her and her child to a dreary existence; with this last great wrong.

"Yes, let it be! let it be!" she cried. In fancy she saw the town lie below her--as she had often seen it with the actual eye from the ramparts--she saw the cl.u.s.tering ma.s.s of warm red roofs and walls, the outlying towers, the church, the one long straight street; and with outstretched arm she doomed it--doomed it with a vengeful sense of the righteousness of the sentence.

Yet, strange to say, that which was uppermost in her mind and steeled her soul and justified the worst, was not the last thing of which she had to complain--her daughter's wrong--but the long years of loneliness, the hundred, nay, the thousand, petty slights of the past, bearable at the time and in detail, but intolerable in the retrospect now hope was gone. She dwelt on these, and the thought of what was coming filled her with a fearful joy. She thought of them, and took the lamp and pa.s.sed into the next room, and, throwing the light on the rough face of brickwork that closed the great window, she eyed the cracks eagerly, and scarcely kept her fingers from beginning the work. For she understood the plot. One man working silently within, in darkness, could demolish the wall in an hour; then a whistle, rope ladders, a line of men ascending, and before midnight the house would vomit armed men, the nearest gate would be seized, the town would lie at the mercy of the enemy!

Presently she had to go to her daughter, but the current of her thoughts kept the same course. The girl was sullen, and lay with her face to the wall, and gave short answers, venting her misery after the common human fas.h.i.+on on the one who loved her best. The mother bore it, not as before with the patience that scorned even to upbraid, but grimly, setting down each peevish word to the score that was so soon to be paid. She lay all night beside her child, and in the small hours heard her weep and felt the bed shake with her unhappiness, and carried the score farther; nay, busied herself with it, so that day and the twittering of sparrows and the booming of the early guns took her by surprise. Took her by surprise, but worked no change in her thoughts.

She was so completely under the influence of the idea, that she felt no fear; the chance of discovery, and the certainty that if discovered she would be done to death without mercy, did not trouble her in the least.

She went about her ordinary tasks until late in the afternoon; then, without preface or explanation, she told her daughter that she was going out to seek a lodging.

The girl was profoundly astonished. "A lodging?" she cried, sitting up.

"For us?"

"Yes," the mother answered coldly. "For whom do you think?"

"And you will leave this house?"

"Yes."

"But when?"

"To-night."

"Leave this house--for a lodging--to-night?" the girl faltered. She could not believe her ears. "Why? What has happened?"

Then the woman, in the fierceness of her mood, turned her arms against her child. "Need you ask?" she cried bitterly. "Do you want to go on living in this house--in this house, which was your father's? To go in and out at this door, and meet our neighbours and talk with them on these steps? To wait here--here, where every one knows you, for the shame that will come? For the man who will never come?"

The girl sank back, shuddering and weeping. The woman covered her head and went out, and presently returned; and in the grey of the evening, which within the walls fell early, the two left the house, the elder carrying a bundle of clothes, the younger whimpering and wondering.

Stupefied by the suddenness of the movement, and her mother's stern purpose, she did not observe that they had left the door on the latch, and the House on the Wall unguarded.

The people with whom they had found a lodging, a little room under the sharply sloping tiles, knew them by name and sight--that in so small a place was inevitable--but found nothing strange in the woman's reason for moving; she said that at home the firing broke her daughter's rest.

The housewife indeed could sympathize with her, and did so. "I never go to bed myself," she said roundly, "but I dream of those wretches sacking the town, and look to awake with my throat cut."

"Tut--tut!" her husband answered angrily. "You will live to wag your tongue and make mischief a score of years yet. And for the town being sacked, there is small chance of that--in these days."

The elder of his new lodgers repeated his words. "Small chance of that?"

she said mechanically. "Is that so?"

The man looked at her with patronage. "Little or none," he said. "If we have to cry Enough, we shall cry it in time, and on terms you may be sure; and they will march in like gentlemen, and an end of it."

"But if it happen at night?" the woman asked curiously. She felt a strange compulsion to put the question. "If they should take us by surprise? What then?"

The man shrugged his shoulders. "Well, then, of course, things might be different," he said. "But, sho! it won't happen. No fear!" he continued hastily, and in a tone that belied his words. "And you, wife, get back to your pots and leave this talking! You frighten yourself to death with imaginings!"

The woman from the House on the Wall went upstairs to her garret. She did not repent of what she had done; but a sense of its greatness began to take hold of her, and whether she would or not, she found herself waiting--waiting and watching for she alone knew what. Given a companion less preoccupied with misery and she must have been suspected. But the girl lay moodily on her bed, and the widow was at liberty to stand at the window with her hands spread on the sill, and look, and listen, and look, and listen, unwatched. She could not see the street, for below their dormer the roof ran down steeply a yard or more to the eaves; but she had full command of the opposite houses, and at one of the windows a young girl was dressing herself. The woman watched her plait her fair hair, looking sideways the while at a little mirror; and saw her put on a poor necklace and remove it again and try a piece of ribbon.

Gradually the watcher became interested; from interest she pa.s.sed to speculation, and wondered with a slight shudder how this girl would fare between that and morning. And then the girl looked up and met the woman's eyes with the innocence of her own--and the woman fell back from the window as if a hand had struck her.

She went no more after that to the window; but until it was quite dark she sat in a chair with her hands on her lap, forcing herself to quietude, as women will, where men would tramp the floor unceasingly.

When it was quite dark she trimmed and lit the lamp, and still she did not repent. But she listened more and more closely, and with less concealment. And the face of the girl preening herself at her poor mirror returned again and again, and troubled her. She could contemplate the fate of the town as a whole, and say, let it be! Ay, in G.o.d's name let it be! But the one face seen at a window, the one case brought home to her, clung to her mind, and p.r.i.c.ked and pained her--dully.

By-and-by she heard the clock strike ten, and her daughter, turning feverishly on the bed, asked her peevishly when she was going to lie down. "Presently," she answered, "presently." And still she sat and listened, and still the girl's face haunted her. She began to picture in detail the thing for which she was waiting. She fancied that she could hear the first alert, followed by single cries, these by a roar of alarm, this by the wild rush of feet; then she heard the cras.h.i.+ng volley, the rattle of hoofs on the pavement, the whirl of the flight through the streets, the shouts of "Germany! Germany!" as the troops swept in triumphant! And then--ah, then!--she heard the things that would follow, the cras.h.i.+ng in of doors, the sudden glare of flames, the screams of men driven to the wall, the yells of drunken Saxons, the shrieks of women, the----

No more! No more! She could not bear it. With a shudder she stood erect, and looked about her--wildly. The lamp burned low, her daughter was asleep. With a swift movement the mother caught up a shawl that lay beside the bed, and turned to the door.

Alas, too late. She had repented, but too late. With her hand on the latch, her foot on the threshold, she stood, arrested by a low distant cry that caught her ear, and swelled even as she listened to it, into a roar of many voices rousing the town. What was it? Alas, she knew; she knew, and cowered against the door whitefaced and shaking. A moment pa.s.sed, and the alarm, after sinking, rose again, and now there was no doubt of its meaning. Shod feet pattered through the streets, windows clattered up noisily; a wild medley of voices broke out, and again in a few seconds was lost in the cras.h.i.+ng sound of the very volley she had foreheard!

From that moment it seemed to her that h.e.l.l was broken loose in the town; and she had loosed it! She could no longer, in the din that rose from the street, distinguish one sound from another; but the crash of distant cannon, the heavy tramp of feet near at hand, the screams and cries and shouting, the blare of trumpets, all rose in a confused babel of sounds that shook the very houses, and blanched the cheeks and drove the blood to the heart. The woman, cowering against the door, covered her ears, and groaned. Her horror at what she had done was so great, that she did not heed what was pa.s.sing near her, nor give a thought to the child in the same room with her until the latter's voice struck her ear, and she turned and found her daughter standing in the middle of the floor, her hand to her breast, and her eyes wide. Then the mother awoke in her again; with pallid shaking lips she cried to her to lie down--to lie down, for there was no danger.

But the girl raised her hand for silence. "Hus.h.!.+" she said. "I hear a step! It is his! It is his! And he is coming to me! Mother, he is coming to me!"

The mother imagined that terror had turned the girl's brain; it was inconceivable that in that roar of sound a single step could make itself heard, or be recognized. And she tried, in a voice that shook with horror and remorse, to repeat her meaningless words of comfort. But they died on her lips, died still-born, as the door flew open, and a man rushed in, gazed an instant, then caught her child in his arms.

It was the Burgomaster's son!

The woman from the House on the Wall leaned an instant against the door-post, gazing at them. Little by little as she looked the expression in her eyes changed, and they took the cold, fixed, distant look of a sleep-walker. A moment and she drew a shuddering breath, and turned and went out, and, groping in the outside darkness for the bal.u.s.trade, went unfaltering into the street.

A part of the garrison happened to be retreating that way at the time. A few were still turning to fire at intervals; but the greater number were hurrying along with bent heads, keeping close to the houses, and intent only on escaping. Reaching the middle of the roadway she stood there like a rock, her face turned in the direction whence the fugitives were hastening.

Presently she saw that for which she waited. In the reek of smoke about the burning gate, towards which she looked--and the flames of which filled the street with a smoky glare--the glitter of steel shone out; and in a moment, rank on rank, a dense column of men appeared, marching shoulder to shoulder. She watched them come nearer and nearer, filling the street from wall to wall, until she could see the glare of their eyes; then with a cry which was lost in the tumult she rushed on the bayonets.