Arminell, a social romance/Chapter 32
CHAPTER XXXII.
A PLACE OF REFUGE.
He thrust her away from him with an exclamation of disgust. Then he stooped. A tuft of meadow-sweet grew among the stones where the dead man lay, and its white flowers were full of pollen, and the pollen, shaken from them, had fallen, and formed a dust over the upturned face.
Captain Saltren drew his black silk kerchief over the dead man's brow, and wiped away the powder, and as he did so was aware that the blue-blottle had returned; he heard its drone, he saw its glazed metallic back, as it flickered about the body. Then he turned and went away, but had not gone far before he halted and came back, for he thought of the insect. That fly teased his mind, it was as though it buzzed about his brain, then perched and ran over it, irritating the nerves with its hasty movement of the many feet, and the tap of its proboscis. He could not endure the thought of that fly—therefore he went back, and stood sweeping with his kerchief up and down over the face and then the hands, protecting the body against the blue-bottle.
He heard his wife running away, crying for help. He knew that before long she would have collected assistants to come to remove the dead body. They would find him there; and was it safe for him to be seen in close proximity to the man he had killed?
He knew that he ought to go. He had a horror of being there, alone with the corpse. Again he took a few steps to leave it, but, looking back over his shoulder, he saw the blue-bottle settle on the forehead, then run down along the nose to the lips of the dead man, and he went back to drive the creature away once more. Presently he heard voices, not those now of cawing rooks, but of men. But he could not stir from the place. He would be committing a sin, an unpardonable sin, a sin from which his soul could not cleanse itself by floods of penitential tears, were he to allow the blue-bottle to deposit its eggs between those dead lips. His mind was unsettled. Now and then only did he think of himself as endangered, and feel an impulse to escape; and yet the impulse was not strong enough to overcome his anxiety to protect the body. He did not consider the future, whether he had occasion to fear for himself, whether he would be put on his defence.
After a flood we find backwaters where promiscuous matter drifts in circles—straw, snags of wood, a dead sheep, a broken chair; so was it in the mind of Stephen Saltren. His ideas were thrown into confusion; thoughts and fancies, most varied and incongruous, jostled each other, without connection. The discovery that his wife had lied to him in the matter of the parentage of Giles and the guilt of Lord Lamerton, following on the excitement in which he had been through the encounter with his enemy, had sufficed to paralyse his judgment, and make his thoughts swerve about incoherently.
He was aware that he had committed a great mistake, he knew that his position was precarious; but his confidence in his vision, and the mission with which he was entrusted remained unshaken, and this confidence justified to his conscience the crime that he had committed, if, indeed, he had committed one. But in the gyration of thoughts in his brain, only one fact stood out clearly—that a blue-bottle fly menaced the corpse, and that it was his duty to drive the insect away.
He was engaged on this obligation, when a hand touched him, and on looking round he saw Patience Kite.
"Captain Saltren," said the woman, "why are you here? I saw you both on top of the cleave, and I do know that he did not fall by chance. I will not tell of you."
He looked at her with blank eyes.
"Others may have seen you besides myself. You must not be found here."
"I am glad," said he, dreamily, talking to himself, not to her, "I am glad that I had, myself, no occasion against him. I thought I had, but I had not."
"Come with me," said Mrs. Kite, "folks are near at hand. I hear them."
He looked wistfully at the dead face.
"I cannot," he said.
"What! Do you want to be taken by the police?"
"I cannot—I am held by the blue-bottle." In a moment she stooped, snapped her hands together and caught the fly.
"Now," said Saltren, "I will follow. It was not I, I am but the miserable instrument. The hand did it that brought him my way, that led him to the edge, and that then laid hold of my arm."
Patience caught him by the shoulder and urged him away.
"You must not be seen near the body. Take my advice and be off to Captain Tubb about some lime, and so establish an alibi."
Saltren shook his head.
"If not, then come along with me. I will show you a hiding-place no one thinks of. Folks could not tell how to take it, when they didn't find me lying buried under the fallen chimney; but when I saw it was cracking, I made off through the dust, and none saw me escape. At the night-meeting some thought, when I stood on the table behind you, that I was a spirit. You can feel my grip on your arm, that I am in the flesh and hearty. I set fire to the tumbled thatch. It does good to scare folks at times."
She drew Saltren into the wood. From a vantage point on the other side of the valley from that of the crag, themselves screened from sight, they could see a cluster of men about the dead body of Lord Lamerton, and Mrs. Saltren gesticulating behind them.
"I wonder," said Patience Kite, "whether that wife of yours be a fool or not? Your safety, I reckon, depends on her tongue. If she has sense, she will say she found the dead lord as she was going to fetch water. If she's a fool she'll let out about you. Did any one see you on the down?"
"I think Macduff went by some time before."
"Yes—I saw'n go along. That was some while afore."
Saltren said nothing. He was less concerned about his own safety than Mrs. Kite supposed. He was intently watching the men raise the dead body.
"It is a pity," pursued Mrs. Kite, "because if you hadn't been seen by Mr. Macduff, I might have sworn you a famous alibi, and made out you was helping me to move my furniture. Thomasine also, she'd ha' sworn anything in reason to do you a good turn. What a sad job it was that you didn't chuck over Macduff as well. But there—I won't blame you. We none of us, as the parson says, do all those things we ought to do, but leave undone what we ought. Thomasine and I'd swear against Mr. Macduff, but I doubt it would do no good, as Mrs. Macduff keeps a victoria and drives about in it, and we don't, so the judge would have respect to the witness of Macduff and disregard ours. And yet they say there is justice and righteousness in the world!—when our testimony would not be taken and Macduff's accepted, along of a victoria."
She caught Saltren's arm again, and led him further into the wood, along a path that seemed to be no path at all for a man to walk, but rather a run for a rabbit. The bushes closed over a mere track in the moss.
"I reckon," muttered Patience, "there'll be a rare fuss made about the death of his lordship; but how little account was made of that of young Tubb. That was a cruel loss to Thomasine and me. My daughter and he were sweethearts. Captain Tubb was going to take the boy on as a hand at the lime quarry; he could not earn twenty shillings in a trade, so he would get fifteen as a labourer. Well—he could have married and kept house on that. Either he and my girl would have lived with me or with his father. Macduff and Lord Lamerton spoiled the chance for me and them. I owe them both a grudge, and I thank you for paying off my score on his lordship. Macduff may wait. In fall I will make a clay figure of him and stick pins in it, and give him rheumatic pains and spasms of the heart. Whatever parsons and doctors may say, I can do things which are not to be found in books, and there is more learning than is got by scholarship."
Mrs. Kite paused and looked round.
"You've not been about in the woods, creeping on all fours as I have, through the coppice. I know my way even in the dark. I can tell it by the feel of the stems of oak. Where there is moss, that is the side to the sou'-west wind and rain. The other side is smooth. So one can get along in the dark. What a moyle there will be over the death of his lordship all because he was a lord, and there was nothing made of the death of Arkie, because he was nobody. There is no justice and righteousness in the world, or Mr. Macduff would be wearing bracelets now and expecting a hempen necklace. Here we are at my cottage that he and his lordship tore down."
They emerged suddenly on the glade where stood the ruins. No one was visible. It remained as it had been left, save that the fallen rafters and walls were blackened by the smoke of the up-flaming thatch.
Patience did not tarry at the hovel, but led the way to the quarry edge.
"Do you see here," she said, "you take hold of the ivy ropes, and creep along after me. It is not hard to do when you know the way. Miss Arminell first led me to the Owl's Nest. One Sunday she came here, and holding the ivy, got along to the cave, and then let go the rope. I went after her; and when my house was being pulled down about my head, then I remembered the cave, and went to it in the same way. Since then I have moved most of my things I want, and Thomasine has helped me. But she couldn't come till her foot was better, along the edge where we shall go. What I cannot carry we let down from above by a rope, and I draw them in to me with a crooked stick. I shall have to pay no ground rent for that habitation, and I defy Mr. Macduff to pull the roof down on me. It is a tidy, comfortable place, in the eye of the sun. What I shall do in winter I cannot tell, but it serves me well enough as a summer house. If I want to bake, I have my old oven in the back kitchen. Now lay hold of the ivy bands and come after me. I will show you where you can lie hid when there is danger at Chillacot."
Saltren followed her, and in a few minutes found himself in the cave. She had hung an old potato sack half-way down the hollow, and behind this she had made her bed and stored her treasures.
"No one can visit me whom I do not choose to receive," said Mrs. Kite. "If I should see a face come round the corner, the way we came, I'd have but to give a thrust, as that you gave his lordship, and down he would go. Now I will return. You remain here. See, I crook the ivy chains over this prong of rock when I am here. Whatever you do, mind and do not let the chains fall away. If you do, you're a prisoner till I release you. That is how Miss Arminell was caught. I'll run and see what is going on, and bring you word."
The old woman unhooked sufficient strands of ivy to support herself, and went lightly and easily along the face of the rock.
Saltren remained standing. He had his hands linked behind his back, and his head projecting. He had not recovered balance of mind; his thoughts were like hares in poachers' gate-nets—entangled, leaping, turning over, and working themselves, in their efforts after freedom, into more inextricable entanglement. But one idea gradually formed itself distinctly in his mind—the idea that he had not been wronged by Lord Lamerton in the way in which he had supposed, and that, therefore, all personal feeling against him disappeared. But, in the confusion of his brain, he carried back this idea to a period before he discovered that he had been deceived by his wife into feeling this grudge, and he justified his action to himself; he satisfied himself that there could have been no private resentment in his conduct to his lordship when he lifted his hand against him, because twenty minutes later he discovered that there were no grounds for entertaining it. This consideration sufficed to dissipate the first sense of guilt that had stolen over him. Now he knelt down in the cave, at its entrance, and thanked heaven that no taint of personal animosity had entered into his motives and marred their purity. It was true that Lord Lamerton had thrown Saltren out of employ—he forgot that. It was true also that, as chairman of the board of directors of the railway, he had sought to force him to surrender his house and plot of land—he forgot that. It was true that at the time when he confronted Lord Lamerton, he believed that his domestic happiness had been destroyed by that nobleman—he forgot that also. He concluded that he had put forth his hand, acting under a divine impulse, and executing, not personal vengeance, but the sentence of heaven.
When a camel, heavy laden, is crossing the desert, the notion sometimes occurs to it that it is over-burdened, that its back is breaking, and it sullenly lies down on the sand. No blows will stir it—not even fire applied to its flanks; but the driver with much fuss goes to the side of the beast, and pretends to unburden it of—one straw. And that one straw he holds under the eye of the camel, which, satisfied that it has been sensibly relieved, gets up and shambles on. Our consciences are as easily satisfied when heavy burdened as the stupid camel. One straw—nay the semblance, the shadow of a straw—taken from them contents us; we rise, draw a long breath, shake our sides, and amble on our way well pleased.
Lord Lamerton had been doomed by heaven for his guilt in the matter of Archelaus Tubb. Was it not written that he who had taken the life of another should atone therefor with his own life? Who was the cause of the lad's death? Surely Lord Lamerton, who had ordered the destruction of the cottage. If the cottage had been left untouched, the chimney would not have fallen. Mr. Macduff was but the agent acting under the orders of his lordship, and the deepest stain of blood rested, not on the agent, but on his instigator and employer. Saltren had been on the jury when the inquest took place, and he had then seen clearly where the fault lay, and who was really guilty in the matter; but others, with the fear of man in them, had not received his opinion and consented to it, and so there had been a miscarriage of justice.
If a bell-pull be drawn, it moves a crank, and the crank tightens a wire, and that wire acts on a second lever, and this second crank moves a spring and sets a bell tingling. The hand that touches the bell-rope is responsible for the tingling of the bell, however far removed from it. So was Lord Lamerton responsible for the death of Archelaus, though he had not touched the chimney with his own hand.
Saltren was, moreover, deeply impressed with the reality of his vision, which had grown in his mind and taken extraordinary dimensions, and had assumed distinct outline as his fancy brooded over it. But it did not occur to his mind that fancy had deceived him, for to Saltren, as to all mystics, the internal imaginings are ever more real than those sensible presentiments which pass before their eyes.
Now he knelt in the cave, relieved of all sense of wrongdoing, and thanked heaven for having called him to vindicate its justice on the man whom human justice had acquitted.