The Courtship of Morrice Buckler Part 16

The moon was setting and the moonlight grey upon the garden, with the snow under foot very crisp and dry.

I sheathed my sword and clambered on to the coping. I turned to look at the Castle--how quietly it slept, and how brightly burned the lights in those two rooms!--and then dropped to the ledge upon the further side of the wall.

I had reached the top of the ridge of rock, when a cry rang out into the night--a cry, shrill and lonesome, in a woman's voice--a cry followed by a great silence. I halted in an agony. 'Twas not fear that I felt; 'twas not even pity. The cry spoke of suffering too great for pity, and I stood aghast at the sound of it, aghast at the thought that my handiwork had begotten it. 'Twas not repeated, however, and I tore down the ridge in a frenzy of haste, taking little care where I set my hands or my feet. How it was that I did not break my neck I have never been able to think.

The village, I remember, was dark and lifeless save just at one house, whence came a murmur of voices, and a red beam of light slipped through a c.h.i.n.k in the shutter and lay like a rillet of blood across the snow.

Once clear of the houses. I ran at full speed down the track. At the corner of the wood, I stopped and looked upwards before I plunged among the trees. The moon had set behind the mountains while I was descending the ridge, and the Castle loomed vaguely above me as though at that spot the night was denser than elsewhere. 'Twas plain that no alarm had been taken, that the cry had not been heard. I understood the reason of this afterwards. The two rooms in the tower were separated by a great interval from the other bedrooms. But what of the Countess, I thought? I pictured her in a swoon upon the corpse of her husband.

Within the coppice 'twas so black that I could not see my hand when I raised it before me, and I went groping my way by guesswork towards the trees to which we had tethered our horses. I dared not call out to Larke; I feared even the sound of my footsteps. Every rustle of the bushes seemed to betray a spy. In the end I began to fancy that I should wander about the coppice until dawn, when close to my elbow there rose a low crooning song:

Que toutes joies et toutes honneurs Viennent d'armes et d'amours.

"Jack!" I whispered.

The undergrowth crackled as he crushed it beneath his feet.

"Morrice, is that you? Where are you?"

A groping hand knocked against my arm and tightened on it. I gave a groan.

"Are you hurt, Morrice? Oh, my G.o.d! I thought you would never come!"

"You have heard nothing?"

"Nothing."

"Not a sound? Not--not a cry?"

"Nothing."

"Quick, then!" said I. "We must be miles away by morning."

He led me to where our horses stood, and we untied them and threaded through the trees to the road.

"Help me to mount, Jack!" said I.

He pulled a flask from his pocket and held it to my lips. 'Twas neat brandy, but I gulped a draught of it as though it were so much water.

Then he helped me into the saddle and settled my feet in the stirrups.

"Why, Morrice," he asked, "what have you done with your spurs?"

"I left them on the terrace," said I, remembering. "I left my spurs, my pistol, and--and something else. But quick, Jack, quick!"

'Twould have saved me much trouble had I brought that "something else"

with me, or at least examined it more closely before I left it there.

He swung himself on to the back of his horse, and we set off at a canter. But we had not gone twenty yards when I cried, "Stop!" 'Twas as though the windows of the Castle sprang at us suddenly out of the darkness, each one alive with a tossing glare of links. It seemed to me that a hundred angry eyes were searching for me. I drove my heels into my horse's flanks and galloped madly down the road in the direction of Italy. A quarter of a mile further, and a bend of the valley hid the Castle from our sight; but I knew that I should never get the face of Countess Lukstein from before my eyes, or the sound of her cry out of my ears.

CHAPTER VII.

I RETURN HOME AND HEAR NEWS OF COUNTESS LUKSTEIN.

From Lukstein we rode hot-foot down the Vintschgau Thal to Meran, and thence by easy stages to Verona, in Italy. I had no great fear of pursuit or detection after the first day, since the road was much frequented by travellers, and neither my spurs, nor my pistol, nor the miniature of Julian bore any marks by which Jack or myself could be singled out. At Verona an inflammation set up in my wounded shoulder, very violent and severe, so that I lay in that town for some weeks delirious and at death's door. Indeed, but for Jack's a.s.siduous care in nursing me, I must infallibly have lost my life.

At length, however, being somewhat recovered, I was carried southwards to Naples, and thence we wandered from town to town through the provinces of Italy until, in the year 1686, the fulness of the spring renewed my blood and set my fancies in a tide towards home. Jack accompanied me to England and took up his abode in my house in c.u.mberland, being persuaded without much difficulty to abandon his pretence of studying the law, and to throw in his lot with me for good and all.

"My estates need a steward," said I, "and I--G.o.d knows I need a friend." And with little more talk the bargain was struck.

During all this time, however, I had not so much as breathed a word to him concerning the doings of that night in Castle Lukstein. At first the matter was too hot in my thoughts, and even afterwards, when the horror of my memories had dimmed, I could not bring myself to the point of speech. Had it not been for the appearance and intervention of the Countess, doubtless I should have blurted out the tale long before. But with her face ever fixed within my view, I could not speak; I could only picture it desolate with grief, and washed with a pitiful rain of tears. Moreover, I knew that Jack would account my story as the story of a worthy exploit, and I shrank from his praise as from a burning iron.

'Twould have, nevertheless, been strange had not my ravings in my delirium disclosed some portion of the night's incidents, and that they did so I understood from a certain speech Jack once made me.

'Twas when I was yet lying sick at Verona. One morning, when I was come to my senses after a feverish night, he walked over to my bedside from the chair where he had been watching.

"I have been a common fool," says he, and repeats the remark, s.h.i.+fting a foot to and fro on the floor; and then he claps his hand upon mine.

"G.o.d send me such a friend as you, Morrice, if ever trouble comes to me!" says he, and so gets him quickly from the room.

Often did I wonder how much I had betrayed, but I had reason subsequently to believe that 'twas very little; just enough to a.s.sure him that I had not flinched from the conflict, with probably some revelation of the fear in which I engaged upon it.

'Twas in the last days of March that I saw once more the rolling slopes of Yewbarrow, streaked here and there with a ribbon of snow, and my house at the base of it, its grey tiles s.h.i.+ning in the sunset like gla.s.s; and a homely restfulness settled upon my spirit, and looking back upon the last months of purposeless wandering, I resolved to pa.s.s my days henceforward in a placid ordering of my estate.

This feeling of peace, however, stayed with me no great while, the very monotony of a quiet life casting me back upon my troubled recollections. As a relief, I sought diversion with Jack's ready a.s.sistance in the pleasures of the field. Hawking, hunting, and climbing--for which somehow my companion never acquired a taste--filled out the hours of daylight We chased the fox on foot along ridges of the hills; we hunted the red deer in the forests about Styhead; we walked miles across fell and valley to watch a wrestling-match or attend a fair. In a word, we lived a clean, open-air life of wholesome activity.

But alas! 'Twas of little profit to me. I would get me tired to bed only to plunge into a whirlpool of unrestful dreams, and toss there until the morning. Sometimes it would be the door of the little staircase to the Count's bedroom. I would see it opening and opening perpetually, and yet never wide open; or again, it would grow gigantic in size, and swing back across the world as though it was hinged betwixt the poles. Most often, however, it would be Count Lukstein's wife. I beheld her now, tall and stately, with her glorious aureole of hair and her dark, unseeing eyes eating through me like a slow fire as she advanced across the room; now I followed her as she moved through the moonlit garden with the taper burning clear and steady in her hand. But, however the dream began, 'twould always end the same way.

The fiery windows of Castle Lukstein would leap upon me out of the darkness, and I would wake in a cold sweat, my body a-quiver, and her lone cry knelling in my ears.

A strange feature of these nightmare fancies, and a feature that greatly perplexed me, was that the Count himself played no part in them. Were my dreams the test and touchstone of the truth, I could never so much as have set eyes upon him. The encounter, the conversation which preceded it, the last cowardly thrust, and the dead form huddled up in my arms among the curtains--of these things I had not even a hint. They became erased from my memory the moment that I fell asleep. Then 'twas always the woman who was pictured to me; in no single instance the man. I wondered at this omission the more, inasmuch as I frequently thought of Count Lukstein during the day-time, remembering with an odd sense of envy the softness of his voice when he spoke concerning his wife.

Spent with the double fatigue of the day's exertions and the night's phantasmal horrors, I betook myself at length to my library, seeking rest, if not forgetfulness, among my old companions. But the delight and joy of books had gone out from me, and nowise could I recover it.

Once the very covers had seemed to me to answer the pressure of my fingers with a friendly welcome; now I applied myself straightway to the text as to a laborious and uncongenial task. I had looked so deeply into a tragic reality that these printed images of life appeared false and distorted, like reflections thrown from a convex mirror; and I understood how it is that those who act are but seldom their own historians, and when they are, content themselves with a simple register of deeds. However, I persevered in this course for a while, hoping that some time my former zest and liking would return to me, and I should taste again the fine flavour of a nicely-ordered sentence or of a discriminate sequence of thoughts.

But one May morning, coming into the study shortly after sunrise, I sat me down, with my limbs unrefreshed and aching, before the "Religio Medici" of the Norwich doctor, and I fell immediately across this pa.s.sage:

"I have heard some with deep sighs lament the lost lines of Cicero; others with as many groans deplore the combustion of the library of Alexandria. For my own part, I think there be too many in the world, and could with patience behold the urn and ashes of the Vatican, could I, with a few others, recover the perished leaves of Solomon."

The words chimed so appositely with my thoughts that I resolved there and then to put the theory into practice, and closing the book, I made a beginning with Sir Thomas Browne. Outside the window the birds piped happily from vernal branches; the shadows played hide-and-seek upon the gra.s.s, and the beck babbled and laughed as it raced down behind the house. I locked the door of the library, and taking the key in my hand, walked to the side of the beck. At this point the stream spouted in a fountain from a cleft of rock, and fell some twelve feet into a deep bason. A group of larches overhung the pool, and the sunlight, sprinkling between the leaves, dappled the clear green surface with an ever-s.h.i.+fting pattern. Into this bason I dropped the key, and watched it sink with a sparkling tail of bubbles to the bottom. 'Twas of a bright metal, so that I could still see it distinctly as it rested on the rock-bed. A large stone lay upon the bank beside me, and with a sudden, uncontrollable impulse I stripped off my clothes, picked up the stone, and diving into the cool water, set it carefully atop of the key. Many months pa.s.sed before I came again to the pool, and found the key still hidden safe beneath the stone; and during those months so much that was strange occurred to me, and I wandered along such new and devious paths, that when I held it again, all rusty and corroded, in my hand, I felt as though it could not have been myself who had dropped it there, but some one whose memories had been transmitted to me and incorporated in my being by a mysterious alchemy.

It was on that very afternoon that the letter was brought to me. Jack and I were sitting at dinner in the big oak dining-room about four of the clock; the great windows were open, and the sunny air streamed in laden with fresh perfumes. I can see Jim Ritson now as he rode up the drive--'twas part of his duty to meet the mail at the post-town of c.o.c.kermouth--I can almost hear his voice as he gave in the letter at the hall-door. "There's a letter for t' maister," he said.

Jim is grown to middle age by this time, and owns a comfortable fat face and a brood of children. But whenever I pa.s.s him in the lanes and fields I ever experience a lively awe and respect for him as for the accredited messenger of fate.