He turned to go, but suddenly recoiled, being face to face with his wife, who had struggled to her feet. With a strange wild cry the woman flung herself into his arms. Ryan caught her, held her one instant, then dashed her heavily to the ground, and fled like a murderer from the place.
The poor thing lay groaning, yet sobered.
"Ah, I remember," she moaned at last, gathering up her bruised and aching limbs. "I was drugged—by you!"
The look of terrible hatred which she darted at Jem Pound was ineffable but calm. He answered her with a stout deniaclass="underline"
"I gave you nothing but brandy, and that I gave you for the best. I didn't mean it to knock you over, but I'm not sorry it did. Bad as it was, it would have been worse if you had seen much more of him."
"Why? What did he say?"
"He said he wouldn't give us a farthing. No, not if you were starving. He said you were less than nothing to him now. He said we might do our worst, and the sooner hell swallowed both of us the better he'd like it."
Mrs. Ryan gave a little cry of pain and anger. She staggered across the dewy grass, and confronted Pound at arm's length. She was shaking and shivering like a withered leaf.
"Jem Pound," said she, "I will tell you what I have known for many weeks, but hidden from you. I will tell you where he has that money, or some of it."
"Where?" cried Pound.
She tapped him lightly on the chest.
"There!" said Mrs. Ryan.
"How the devil do you know?"
"By woman's wit. On that night, when my hand rested there on his breast for one moment, he pushed me from him. I remembered afterwards that he started from my hand as though I touched a wound. I did the same thing to-night, only on purpose, and you know how he took it: he flung me to the ground this time. Mark my words, there is that which he values more than anything else hung round his neck and resting there! Whatever it is, take it, Jem Pound! Do you hear? You are bad enough for anything: then take it—even if you have to take his life with it!"
Her voice was hoarse and horrible, yet so low that it could scarcely be heard. Without waiting for an answer, she turned swiftly away and disappeared in the darkness.
Jem Pound drew a long deep breath.
"This," said he, "is the best night's work I've done since I came back to the Old Country. This morning I didn't dream of anything so good. Now I see a better night's work not far ahead!"
He proceeded to carve a cake of black tobacco slowly and deliberately, then filled his pipe. As he did this, leaning with his broad back against the gate, a sound came to his ears across the silent sleeping meadows—a strange sound to him—the sound, in fact, of a woman's song. His pipe was by this time loaded, and the mouthpiece between his teeth. Moreover, the match-box was in his left hand and a match in his right. Yet Jem Pound actually did not strike that match until the strange sound had died away!
I know not what spirit was abroad that night to invest a simple, well-known drawing-room song with the sinews of Fate; yet not only in the fields, but far up the road, where Colonel Bristo was wandering alone in the faint light of the sickle moon, the low clear notes were borne out on the wings of the evening. The Colonel faced about at the first note, and walked back quite quickly. His solitary wanderings at all times of the day were a great weakness of the old fellow, but his daughter's singing was a greater; and she sang so seldom now. He walked on the wet grass at the roadside rather than lose a note through the noise of his own footsteps; and lo! when he came near the house, he descried a tall figure standing motionless in the very middle of the road.
Surely some spirit was abroad that night, that all the waking world drew near and listened to that song of Alice's! It should have been a greater song—noble poetry wedded to music such as the angels make in heaven and have sometimes—in golden ages gone by—breathed into the souls of men, who have found the secret too wondrous sweet and terrible to keep. To touch the sensibilities of the different unknown listeners, it should have been a mighty song indeed! But, you see, Alice herself knew nothing of what was happening; she was aware of only one listener, who was humbly standing by her side; and out of the pitiful fulness of her heart she sang the sad and simple words that you have heard often enough, no doubt:Falling leaf and fading tree,
Lines of white in a sullen sea,
Shadows rising on you and me;
The swallows are making them ready to fly,
Wheeling out on a windy sky.
Good-bye, summer! good-bye, good-bye!
A thin film floated over the eyes of Colonel Bristo. The same thing had occasionally happened before when his daughter sang. But lately she had been singing so little, and the song was so sad, and the voice more plaintive than it had ever been formerly.
As for Miles, the other listener in the road, he stood like one entranced. Her singing had haunted his soul now many weeks; it was many weeks since he had heard it last—save in his dreams; besides, the words put the match to a desperate train of thought.
The last bars of the song, then, came as a shock to the audience of two outside in the road, who had not realised that the song would ever stop:"What are we waiting for, you and I?"
A pleading look, a stifled cry;
"Good-bye for ever! good-bye, good-bye!"
The last notes of all were low, and the singer's best. They were charged with wild grief; they seemed to end in a half-sob of anguish. But the voice had caught all the passion of the words, and something more besides. For whom was this passion?
It all died away. The world outside was tamer than before; the sickle moon dipped down to rest below the hill beyond the village, and those lanes and meadows knew no such singing any more.
The tall listener in the road still gazed at the holland blind that flapped against the sash of the open window. It was all the sound that came from the room now. He was repeating the last words of the song, and weighing them.
"No, no," he was thinking, "if I may not live for her, what else is there to live for? God, let me die for her!"
A glowing red spot approached him through the darkness that had fallen upon the land; it was the Colonel's cigarette. It brought him back to the world as it was—his world, and a vile one.
"I was taking a little stroll," said Colonel Bristo. "Will you join me? I think Alice will sing no more to-night."
Meanwhile, in the room, the singer had risen. She meant to quietly put away the music, but it slipped from her fingers. She turned with wet gentle eyes to one who was speaking to her, then fled at his words from the room.
Yet Dick had only asked her: "Will you never, never forgive me?"
XXV
MELMERBRIDGE CHURCH
Dick was in the passage, brushing a week's dust from his hard felt hat; he was going to church this Sunday morning; half the party were going. From the gun-room came the sound of a pen gliding swiftly over foolscap, and the perfume of Mr. Pinckney's pipe; from the open air a low conversational murmur, kept up by Mrs. Parish and Mr. Miles on the steps. Dick, though not unconscious of these sounds, was listening for another—a certain footstep on the stairs. It came at last. Alice came slowly down; Alice, prayer-book in hand, in the daintiest of white dresses and the prettiest, simplest straw hat; Alice for whom Mrs. Parish and Miles and Dick were all three waiting.
Her step was less light than it should have been. The slim little figure positively drooped. Her eyes, too, seemed large and bright, and dark beyond nature, though that may have been partly from the contrast with a face so pale. The girl's altered looks had caused anxiety at Teddington, but the change to Yorkshire had not visibly improved them. This morning, after a night made even more restless than others by a sudden influx of hopes and fears, this was painfully apparent.