Greater Love Hath No Man/Chapter 18
CHAPTER XVIII
THE ESCAPE
THERE was no other way. Through the long blackness of that night, while the guards' steps, on their rounds, rang along the steel platforms, and the faint, low, indefinable medley of sounds from the sleeping prison seemed to whisper and murmur in stealth together, Varge lay upon his cot fighting out this new problem that had come to him. As a mathematician evolves some strange and abstruse calculation, checking and rechecking his steps to verify his solution and finding ever the same result, so to Varge, over and over again came inevitably the same conclusion. There was no other way—he must escape.
To stay there, to see her day by day, to touch her perhaps, to hear her voice, to have the awful, ironic hopelessness of it all thrust upon him with each look into that dear face that stirred his soul to the depths in an agony of yearning, was beyond his strength to bear. To be with her so and never to speak, to smother beneath a calm exterior a passion that rocked and swayed and dominated every faculty, every thought that was in him, was the path that led irrevocably to the day of madness, which, sooner than have come, he might better take his own life. She must never know—this hurt, to shock and frighten her, that would live in her life and bring sorrow to the tender, sensitive heart so full of human sympathy and love for others, must never come to her. There was no other way. For his own sake, from torment that would sweep from him his reason; for her sake, that no blight might come upon the fresh, young, happy life—he must go.
And for that other thing, the crime upon his shoulders, Mrs. Merton's belief in his innocence—his going changed nothing—in her eyes, in the eyes of the law all remained the same. Strange that he should do what he had risked his life to prevent others from accomplishing? They were guilty men—he was innocent.
He would have liked to see her, just to have a single glimpse of her again before he went—his heart cried out for that. But he put the thought from him, he dared not yield to the temptation. He must go at once while his resolution was unshaken. It would be days, three or four of them Doctor Kreelmar had told him in an evening visit to his cell, before Janet would be out again. They had taken her to a neighbour's house where she would have every care. No; he must go at once—with the coming day—snatch at the first opportunity that he could make.
And so the night passed and morning came, and once more Varge walked from the prison gates to the warden's home and turned into the maple-shaded driveway by the lawn. A scene far different from that of the days before presented itself. The hedges, torn by the excited villagers, gaped with holes; the flower beds had been ruthlessly trampled upon; in the centre of the lawn were piles of furniture, tarpaulin covered, like strange biers—and everywhere the smell of charred timber vitiated the air. The house itself from the front, however, appeared little changed; within and at the back the damage had been great—though not so great, he found as he walked around and viewed it, but that it could easily be rebuilt before the summer was at an end.
Disorder was everywhere about—the warden had told him to do what he could to "tidy" up.
Varge smiled a little grimly to himself as he set to work—keeping always where he could command a view of the road. This was to be his last day, or, rather, his last morning there, for he would wait until late on in the afternoon, as near to night-fall as he could. If he made the attempt now, he would be missed at noon, if not sooner, and there would be all the afternoon in which to scour the country for him; if he waited until it was nearly time to go back to the penitentiary for the night, he would be missed then almost immediately it was true, but over-weighing this was the fact that only a few hours then would intervene before darkness set in.
The morning hours dragged by. Villagers came and stared at the house; a gang of convicts, accompanied by guards and wagons, removed the furniture from the lawn to the cover of one of the prison sheds within the walls.
At noon, a little disturbed, Varge went back to the penitentiary and fell into lock-stepped file for the march to the dining-hall—Kingman, patrolling the road, had for the most part passed at fairly consistent intervals; but there had been two occasions, exceptions that caused Varge uneasiness now, when those intervals had been cut almost in half.
From the great stacked slices of bread—of which each man was allowed to help himself without restriction as he filed by the sort of narrow pantryway where the bread was piled and the tins of food were laid out—Varge quietly took several pieces more than he was in the habit of doing; and by the time the meal was finished these were tucked inside his jacket.
Once outside the prison gates again, he hurried back to the warden's house, anxious to get there while the villagers were still at their noonday meals and before they would come around to gaze and over-run the place again as they had during the morning. To his satisfaction no one was in sight. He walked straight to the barn, stopped to glance with apparent unconcern about him, made sure that he was alone, then stepped inside and drew the sliding door shut behind him.
Janet had sent him one day to look for a pruning knife that had been mislaid somewhere, and in his search he had gone to the hay-loft, which now was used as a storage room for the house, and filled with old trunks, broken furniture and the usual garret accumulation. He had seen an old pair of trousers and a discarded coat of the warden's lying there.
He secured these now, undressed quickly, put on the trousers and drew the striped prison pair on over the others. Placing his store of bread in the pockets of the coat, he folded the garment, wrapped it around his body bandage-fashion and tied it there with a piece of thin rope, which he took from a small chest, or box, around which it had been corded; then he donned his prison jacket, and began to search hastily around the loft. A very dirty and ragged soft-felt hat rewarded his search. This he slipped inside his jacket, went out of the barn, and calmly proceeded with his work from where he had left off in the morning.
It was as nearly five o'clock as he was able to judge the time by the sun, when he took his wheelbarrow, placed a spade, trowel, rake and hoe in it, went down the driveway to the road and stopped halfway along the outside edge of the hedge. Here, he unloaded his tools and began to busy himself with one of the holes that the children had made in the hedge the previous afternoon. Kingman was just coming up the road from the direction of the creek.
Varge, to all appearances oblivious of the other's approach, worked steadily on, his back turned to the road. Kingman rode slowly by. Varge turned a little now to watch him. Kingman passed the prison, kept on up the road, and presently disappeared from sight behind the rise of a little hill. The average time before he would reappear again coming back and be able to command a view of the road clear to the creek was ten minutes—but twice that morning it had not been ten minutes—well, that was the risk he had to take, it would only mean a dash for it at the end, and instant pursuit instead of an hour's start before he was missed.
Varge dropped the rake from his hand to the ground, deliberately wheeled the 'barrow onto the road and started with it toward the village. He swung along quickly, but without show of haste. It was the very audacity and simplicity of his plan that he counted on for success. They could not see him from the walls; true, it was unusual for a convict to walk down the road, but after the fire of yesterday a little of the unusual might be expected by those he met; everybody knew him as the man who worked at the warden's place—and what more natural supposition, deduced from the bumping wheelbarrow, than that he had been sent, perhaps to the village store, for something too heavy, too unwieldy to carry by hand! There was Kingman—only Kingman—to fear.
If he could reach the creek, he would ask no more. The momentary view he had had from the roof of the house yesterday had furnished him with a mental map of the surrounding country—the bank of the creek from the left of the bridge ran flat and bare for a few hundred yards, then grew bush-lined, the bushes gradually blending into a large, heavily-wooded tract, where, he was almost sure, there was a sharp bend in the stream itself. To have attempted to reach the woods by cutting across the fields was to risk being seen, he could have no possible business there and the alarm would be given instantly—it was a very different thing to invite observation!
He was well down the road now. The houses were closer together on either hand—the homes of the guards, mostly. He went on unconcernedly—the few people he passed, as he had expected, paid little attention to him—he was too obvious. The large building on the bank of the creek at the left of the road—he was within a hundred yards of it now—he could see was the general store.
Suddenly he strained his ears to listen. Behind him, over the thump, thump, thump of the wheelbarrow, sounded horse's hoofs coming on at a sharp trot. He did not turn his head—there was no sound of wheels—it was Kingman. The average ten minutes that he had hoped for was not to be his—Kingman, this time, could have ridden but a short distance over the rise of the hill before turning back.
Not a muscle of Varge's face moved; the slight lengthening of his stride was imperceptible. To run was certain capture—Kingman had seen him, of course, but Kingman was not yet suspicious, only curious; if he ran, it would be the signal for Kingman to break into a gallop, yell out a warning, and from the houses on either side would rush out the night guards, off duty now at their homes and probably up, and they would have him in a trap. Neither was there any turning back to make another attempt at a more favourable moment. Once the start had been made, it was inevitably a start to the finish—he had realised and accepted that from the beginning. Kingman evidently believed, so far, that some one, possibly the warden himself, had sent him to the village—the only excuse for his presence there that would avail—an excuse that, if he attempted it, would fall like dead leaves at the first investigation, with the result that he would be taken back, punished for attempted escape, and be kept thereafter strictly confined behind the prison walls.
With his ear he measured the distance of Kingman behind him, and with his eye the distance—fifty yards now—to the bridge. One thing in his favour he had noted ever since he started—the bed of the creek could not be seen by any one coming along the road.
Closer, louder, sharper pounded the hoofs. Twenty yards to go! Varge's eyes fixed on what was evidently a little path used by the children, and possibly their elders as well, to scramble up and down on from the road to the edge of the stream. Ten yards! It was just at the corner of the store, too narrow for a horse, the store seemed built almost on the water's edge and the bridge railing came close—now!
He turned the wheelbarrow into the path, sacrificed a half second to give an air of leisurely nonchalance to his movements—and then, as the side of the building hid him from the road, he shot the wheelbarrow forward from his hands, leaped down the little declivity and ran like a deer along the bank for the bushes ahead. Kingman's natural course would be to ride onto the bridge to look over to discover what he could possibly be doing with a wheelbarrow on the bank of the creek—perhaps expecting to see him after a load of sand. By that time, when Kingman would catch sight of him and for the first time realise that it was an escape, he should be close to the bushes.
Once in the woods, and he would have a start again; it would take them time to organise a posse. With that start he should be able to elude them until dark. When the advantage would be his and—
Hoofs rattled on the wooden bridge. Varge was running with all his strength, sure, light-footed, speeding like the wind—the bushes, the trees, were growing nearer and nearer, almost at hand.
"Halt!"—hoarse-flung rang the command from the bridge.
Just a yard, half a yard, a foot still to make—the roar of a carbine echoed and reverberated up and down the little valley—a bullet drummed the air with a low, venomous whir close to his head, and clipped a shower of leaves from the branches—and the next instant Varge had plunged into the bushes and was hidden from sight.