Bog-Myrtle and Peat Part 20

He tried to remember how it happened, and in what order--so much within an hour.

He had gone in the short and dark London afternoon into her drawing-room. Something had detained him--a look, the pressure of a hand, a moment's lingering in a glance--he could not remember which.

Then the crowd of gilded youth ebbed reluctantly away. There was long silence after they had gone, as Miriam Gale and he sat looking at each other in the ruddy firelight. Nor did their eyes sever till with sudden unanimous impulse they clave to one another. Then the fountains of the deep were broken up, and the deluge overwhelmed their souls.

What happened after that? Something Miriam was saying about some one named Reginald. Her voice was low and earnest, thrillingly sweet. How full of charm the infantile tremble that came into it as she looked entreatingly at him! He listened to its tones, and it was long before he troubled to follow the meaning. She was telling him something of an early and foolish marriage--of a life of pain and cruelty, of a new life and sphere of action, all leading up to the true and only love of her life. Well, what of that? He had always understood she had been married before. Enwoven in the mesh-net of her scented hair, her soft cheek warm and wet against his, all this talk seemed infinitely detached--the insignificant problems of a former existence, long solved, prehistoric, without interest. Then he spoke. He remembered well what he had said. It was that to-morrow they twain, drawing apart from all the evil tongues of the world, were to begin the old walk along the Sure Way of Happiness. The world was not for them. A better life was to be theirs.

They would wander through n.o.ble and high-set cities. Italy, beloved of lovers, waited for them. Her stone-pines beckoned to them. There he would tell her about great histories, and of the lives of the knights and ladies who dwelt in the cities set on the hills.

"I am so ignorant," Miriam Gale had said, pus.h.i.+ng his head back that she might look at his whole face at once. "I am almost afraid of you--but I love you, and I shall learn all these things."

It was all inconceivable and strange. The glamour of love mingled with the soft, fitful firelight reflected in Miriam's eyes, till they twain seemed the only realities. So that when she began to speak of her husband, it seemed at first no more to John Arniston than if she had told him that her s...o...b..ack was yet alive. He and she had no past; only a future, instant and immediate, waiting for them to-morrow.

How many times did they not move apart after a last farewell? John Arniston could not tell, though to content himself he tried to count.

Then, their eyes drawing them together again, they had stood silent in the long pause when the life throbs to and fro and the heart thunders in the ears. At last, with "To-morrow!" for an iterated watchword between them, they parted, and John Arniston found himself in the street. It was the full rush of the traffic of London; but to him it was all strangely silent. Everything ran noiselessly to-night. Newsboys mouthed the latest horror, and John Arniston never heard them. Mechanically he avoided the pa.s.sers-by, but it was with no belief in their reality. To him they were but phantom shapes walking in a dream. His world was behind him--and before. The fragrance of the bliss of dreams was on his lips.

His heart bounded with the thought of that "To-morrow" which they had promised to one another. The white Italian cities which he had visited alone gleamed whiter than ever before him. Was it possible that he should sit in the great square of St. Mark's with Miriam Gale by his side, the sun making a patchwork of gold and blue among the pinnacles of the Church of the Evangelist? There, too, he saw, as he walked, the Lido sh.o.r.e, and the long sickle sweep of the beach. The Adriatic slumbrously tossed up its toy surges, and lo! a tall girl in white walked hand-in-hand with him. He caught his breath. He had just realised that it was all to begin to-morrow. Then again he saw that glimmering white figure throw itself down in an agony of parting into the low chair, kneeling beside which his life began.

But stop--what was it after all that Miriam had been saying? Something about her husband? Had he heard aright--that he was still alive, only dead to her?--"Dead for many years," was her word. After all, it was no matter. Nothing mattered any more. His G.o.ddess had stepped down to him with open arms. He had heard the beating of her heart. She was a breathing, loving woman.

"To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow." It seemed so far away. And were there indeed other skies, blue and clear, in Italy, in which the sun shone? It seemed hard to believe with the fog of London, yellow and thick like bad pea-soup, taking him stringently in the throat.

How he found his way back to his room, walking thus in a maze, he never could recall. As the door clicked and he turned towards the fireplace, his eye fell upon a brown-paper parcel lying on the table. John Arniston opened it out in an absent way, his mind and fancy still abiding by the low chair in Miriam's room. What he saw smote him suddenly pale. He laid his hand on the mantelpiece to keep from falling.

It was nothing more than a plain, thick quarto volume, covered with a worn overcoat of undressed calf-skin. At the angle of the back and on one side the rough hair was worn thin, and the skin showed through. His mother had done that, reaching it down for his father to "take the book"[2] in the old house at home. John Arniston sat down on the easy-chair with the half-unwrapped parcel on his knee. His eye read the pages without a letter printing itself on his retina. It was a book within a book, and without also, which he read. He read the tale of the smooth places on the side. No one in the world but himself could know what he read. He saw this book, his father's great house Bible, lying above a certain grey head, in the white square hole in the wall. Beneath it was a copy of the _Drumfern Standard_, and on the top a psalm-book in which were his mother's spectacles, put there when she took them off after reading her afternoon portion.

[Footnote 2: Engage in family wors.h.i.+p.]

He opened the book at random: "_And G.o.d spake all these words saying_ ... THOU SHALT NOT--" The tremendous sentence smote him fairly on the face. He threw his head violently back so that he might not read any further. The book slipped between his knees and fell heavily on the floor.

But the words which had caught his eye, "THOU SHALT NOT--" were printed in fire on the ceiling, or on his brain--he did not know which. He got up quickly, put on his hat, and went out again into the bitter night.

He turned down to the left and paced the Thames Embankment. The fog was thicker than ever. Unseen watercraft with horns and steam-roarers grunted like hogs in the river. But in John Arniston's brain there was a conflict of terrible pa.s.sion.

After all, it was but folklore, he said to himself. Nothing more than that. Every one knew it. All intelligent people were nowadays of one religion. The thing was manifestly absurd--the Hebrew fetich was dead--dead as Mumbo Jumbo. "Thank G.o.d!" he added inconsequently. He walked faster and faster, and on more than one occasion he brushed hurriedly against some of the brutal frequenters of that part of the world on foggy evenings. A rough lout growled belligerently at him, but shrank from the gladsome light of battle which leaped instantly into John Arniston's eye. To strike some one would have been a comfort to him at that moment.

Well, it was done with. The effete morality of a printed book was no tie upon him. The New Freedom was his--the freedom to do as he would and possess what he desired. Yet after all it was an old religion, this of John's. It has had many names; but it has never wanted priests to preach and devotees to practise its very agreeable tenets.

John Arniston stamped with his foot as he came to this decision. The fog was clearing off the river. It was no more than a mere sc.u.m on the water. There was a rift above, straight up to the stars.

"AND G.o.d SPAKE ALL THESE WORDS--."

"No," he said, over and over, "I shall not give her up. It is preposterous. Yet my father believed it. He died with his hand on the old Bible, his finger in the leaves--my mother--"

"AND G.o.d SPAKE ALL THESE WORDS--." The sentence seemed to flash through the rift over the shot-tower--to tingle down from the stars.

There are no true perverts. When man strips him to the bare buff, he is of the complexion his mother bestowed upon him. When his life's card-castle, laboriously piled, tumbles ignominious, he is again of his mother's religion.

"AND G.o.d--."

John Arniston stepped to the edge of the parapet. He looked over into the slow, swirling black water. It was a quick way that--but no--it was not to be his way. He looked at his watch. It was time to go to the office. He had an article to do. As well do that as anything. But first he would write a letter to her.

Shut in his room, his hand flying swiftly lest it should turn back in spite of him, John Arniston wrote a letter to Miriam Gale--a letter that was all one lie. He could not tell her the true reason why he would not go on the morrow. Who was he, that he should put himself in the att.i.tude of being holier than Miriam Gale? It was certainly not because he did not wish to go--or that he thought it wrong. Simply, his father's calf-skin Bible barred the way, and he could no more pa.s.s over it than he could have trampled over his mother's body to his desire.

It was done. The letter was written. What was the particular excuse, invented fiercely at the moment, there is no use writing down here to c.u.mber the page. John Arniston cheerfully gave himself over to the recording angel. Yet the ninth commandment is of equal interpretation, though it may be somewhat less clearly and tersely expressed than the seventh.

He went out and posted his note at a pillar-box in a quiet street with his own hand. The postman had just finished clearing when John came to thrust in the letter to Miriam Gale. The envelope slid into an empty receiver as the postman clicked the key. He turned to John with a look which said--"Too late that time, sir!" But John never so much as noticed that there was a postman by his side, who shouldered his bags with an air of official detachment. John Arniston went back to his room, and while he waited for a book of reference (for articles must be written so long as the pillars of the firmament stand) he lifted an evening paper which lay on the table. He ran his eye by instinct over the displayed cross headings. His eye caught a name. "Found Drowned at Battersea Bridge--Reginald Gale."

"Reginald Gale," said John to himself--"where did I hear that name?"

Like a flash, every word that Miriam had told him about her worthless husband--his treatment of her, his desertion within a few days of her marriage--stood plain before him as if he had been reading the thing in proof.... Miriam Gale was a free woman.

And his pitiable lying letter? It was posted--lurking in the pillar-box round the corner, waiting to speed on its way to break the heart of the girl, who had been willing to risk all, and count the world well lost for the sake of him.

He seized his hat and ran down-stairs, taking the steps half a dozen at a time. He met the boy coming up with the book. He pa.s.sed as if he had stepped over the top of him. The boy turned and gazed open-mouthed. The gentlemen at the office were all of them funny upon occasion, but John Arniston had never had the symptoms before.

"He's got a crisis!" said the boy to himself, clutching at an explanation he had heard once given in the sub-editor's room.

For an hour John Arniston paced to and fro before that pillar-box, timing the pa.s.sing policeman, praying that the postman who came to clear it might prove corruptible.

Would he never come? It appeared upon the white enamelled plate that the box was to be cleared in an hour. But he seemed to have waited seven hours in h.e.l.l already. The policeman gazed at him suspiciously. A long row of jewellers' shops was just round the corner, and he might be a professional man of standing--in spite of the fur-collar of his coat--with an immediate interest in jewellery.

The postman came at last. He was a young, alert, beardless man, who whistled as he came. John Arniston was instantly beside him as he stooped to unlock the little iron door.

"See here," he said eagerly, in a low voice, "I have made a mistake in posting a letter. Two lives depend on it. I'll give you twenty pounds in notes into your hand now, if you let me take back the letter at the bottom of that pillar!"

"Sorry--can't do it, sir--more than my place is worth. Besides, how do I know that you put in that letter? It may be a jewel letter from one of them coves over there!"

And he jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

John Arniston could meet that argument.

"You can feel it," he said; "try if there is anything in it, coin or jewels--you could tell, couldn't you?"

The man laughed.

"Might be notes, sir, like them in your hand--couldn't do it, indeed, sir."

The devil leaped in the hot Scots blood of John Arniston.

He caught the kneeling servant of Her Majesty's n.o.blest monopoly by the throat, as he paused smiling with the door of the pillar-box open and the light of the street-lamp falling on the single letter which lay within. The clutch was no light one, and the man's life gurgled in his throat.

John Arniston s.n.a.t.c.hed the letter, glanced once at the address. It was his own. There was, indeed, no other. Hurriedly he thrust the four notes into the hand of the half-choked postman. Then he turned and ran, for the windows of many tall houses were spying upon him. He dived here and there among archways and pa.s.sages, manoeuvred through the purlieus of the market, and so back into the offices of his paper.

"And where is that _Dictionary of National Biography_?" asked John Arniston of the boy. The precious letter for which he had risked penal servitude and the cat in the prisons of his country for robbery of the Imperial mails (accompanied with violence), was blazing on the fire.

Then, with professional readiness, John Arniston wrote a column and a half upon the modern lessons to be drawn from the fact that Queen Anne was dead. It was off-day at the paper, Parliament was not sitting, and the columns opposite the publishers' advertis.e.m.e.nts needed filling, or these gentlemen would grumble. The paper had a genuine, if somewhat spasmodic, attachment to letters. And from this John Arniston derived a considerable part of his income.

When he went back to his room he found that his landlady had been in attending to the fire. She had also lifted the fallen Bible, on which he could now look with some complacency--so strange a thing is the conscience.

On the worn hair covering of the old Bible lay a letter. It was from Miriam--a letter written as hastily as his own had been, with pitiful tremblings, and watered with tears. It told him, through a maze of burning love, among other things that she had been a wicked woman to listen to his words--and that while her husband lived she must never see him again. In time, doubtless, he would find some one worthier, some one who would not wreck his life, as for one mad half-hour his despairing Miriam had been willing to do. Finally, he would forgive her and forget her. But she was his own--he was to remember that.

In half an hour John Arniston was at the mortuary. Of course, he found a pressman there with a notebook before him. With him he arranged what should be said the next morning, and how the inquest should be reported.

There was no doubt about the ident.i.ty, and John Arniston soon possessed the proofs of it. But, after all, there was no need that the British public should know more than it already knew, or that the name of Miriam Gale should be connected with the drowned wretch, whose soddenly friendly leer struck John Arniston cold, as though he also had been in the Thames water that night.