The Front Yard Part 10

"And how can you prevent it?"

"Are you daring me?"

"By no means," answered Pauline; and this time she really tried to speak gently. "I was calling to your remembrance the fact that there is no tie between us, Mr. Ash; you have no shadow of authority over my actions; I am free to do as I please."

"I know you are; that is the worst of it," he said, almost with a groan.

"Pauline, don't play with me now. I have given up hoping for anything for myself--if I ever really did hope; I am not worthy of you. Whether you could make me worthy I don't know; but I don't ask you that; I don't ask you to try; it would be too much. I only ask you to be as you have been; as you were, I mean, during all those many weeks, not as you have been lately. Only a few days are left when I can see you freely; be kind to me, then, during those few days, and then I will take myself off."

"I mean to be kind; I am kind."

"Then ride with me to-morrow; just this once more."

"But I told you it was impossible; I told you I was going to Naples."

The pleading vanished from Ash's face and voice. "_I_ never asked you to do that--to go off with me for a whole day."

Pauline did not answer; she was arranging the flowers which Mrs. Ash had industriously gathered.

"So much the greater fool I!--is that what you are thinking?" Ash went on, laughing discordantly.

For the moment Pauline forgot to be angry in the vague feeling, something like fear, which took possession of her. All fear is uncomfortable, and she hated discomfort; she gave herself a little inward shake as if to shake it off. "I shall ask Cousin Oc to go back to Paris next week," was her thought. "I have had enough of Italy for the present--Italy and madmen!"

"You won't go?" asked Ash, bending forward eagerly, as though he had gained hope from her silence.

"To Paris?"

"Are we speaking of Paris? To Naples--to-morrow."

"Oh, I must go to Naples," she answered, gayly. In spite of her gayety she turned towards the Basilica; Mrs. Ash was the nearest person.

"You are going to my mother? She, at least, is a good woman; she would never have tarnished herself with such an expedition as you are planning!" cried Ash, in a fury.

Pauline turned white. "I am well paid for ever having endured you, ever having liked you," she said, in a low voice, as she hastened on. "I might have known--I might have known."

There was not much to choose now between the expression of the two faces, for the woman's sweet countenance showed in its pallor an anger as vivid as that which had flushed the face of the man beside her, with a red so dark that his blue eyes looked unnaturally light by contrast, as though they had been set in the face of an Indian.

Mrs. Ash had come hurriedly out to meet them. Her son paid no attention to her; all his powers were evidently concentrated upon holding himself in check. "I shouldn't have said it, even if it were the plain brutal truth," he said. "But you madden me, Pauline. I mean what I say--you really do drive me into a kind of madness."

"I have no desire to drive you into anything; I have no desire to talk with you further," she answered.

"No, no, dearie, don't say that; talk ter him a little longer," said Mrs. Ash, coming forward, her face set in a tremulous smile. "I'm sure it's very pleasant here--beside these buildings. And John thinks so much of you; he means no harm."

"Poor mother!" said Ash, his voice softening. "She does not dare to say to you what she longs to say; she would whisper it if she could; and that is, 'Don't provoke him!' She has some pretty bad memories--haven't you, mother?--of times when I've--when I've gone a-hunting, as one may say. She'll tell you about them if you like."

"I don't want to hear about them; I don't want to hear about anything,"

answered Mrs. Graham, troubled out of all her composure, troubled even out of her anger by the strangeness of this strange pair. She looked about for some one, and, seeing Carew coming from the tents of the camp, she waved her hand to attract his attention and beckoned to him; then she went forward to meet him as he hastened towards her.

Ash disengaged himself from his mother, who, however, had only touched his arm entreatingly, for she had learned to be very cautious where her son was concerned; he strode forward to Pauline's side.

"I should rather see you dead before me than go with that man to-morrow."

"Pray don't kill me, at least till the day is over," Pauline answered, her courage, and her unconquerable carelessness too, returning in the approach of Carew. "It would be quite too great a disappointment to lose my day."

"You _shall_ lose it!" said Ash, with a loud coa.r.s.e oath.

"Oh!" said the woman, all her lovely delicate person shrinking away from him.

Her intonation had been one of disgust. She held the skirt of her habit closer, as if to avoid all contact.

V

At five o'clock of the same afternoon Freemantle, Gates, and Beckett, with Arthur Abercrombie, came running along the narrow streets of a village some miles from Paestum.

The stone houses of which this village was composed stood like two solid walls facing each other, rising directly from the stone-paved road, which was barely ten feet wide; down this conduit water was pouring like a brook. The houses were about forty in number, twenty on each side, and this one short street was all there was of the town.

It was raining, not in drops, but in torrents, with great pats of water coming over, almost like stones, and striking upon the heads of those who were pa.s.sing below; every two or three minutes there came a glare of blindingly white lightning, followed immediately by the crash of thunder, which seemed to be rolling on the very roofs of the houses themselves. The four boys must have been out in the storm for some time, for they paid no attention to it. Their faces were set, excited. Every thread of their clothing was wet through.

"This is the house," said Arthur.

They looked up, sheltering their eyes with their arms from the blows of the rain-b.a.l.l.s. From the closed windows above, the faces of Isabella Holland and the three Abercrombie girls looked down at them, pressed flatly against the small panes, in order to see; for the storm had made the air so dark that the street lay in gloom.

The next moment the boys entered.

"No, we haven't found him," said Arthur, in answer to his white sisters'

look. "But we're going to."

"Yes, we're going to," said the others. And then, walking on tiptoe in their soaked shoes, they went softly into an inner room.

Here on a couch lay Griffith Carew, dying.

An Italian doctor was still trying to do something for the unconscious man. He had an a.s.sistant, and the two were at work together. Near by, old Mrs. Preston sat waiting, her hands folded upon the k.n.o.b of a cane which stood on the floor before her, her chin resting upon her hands. In this bent position, with her disordered white hair and great black eyes, she looked witch-like. Three candles burned on a table at the head of the bed, illumining Carew and the two doctors and the waiting old woman.

The room was long, and its far end was in shadow. Was there another person present--sitting there silent and motionless? Yes--Pauline. The boys came to the foot of the bed and gazed with full hearts at Griff.

Griff had been shot by John Ash two hours before. The deed had been done just as they had reached the shelter of this village, swept into it almost by a tornado, which, preceding the darker storm, had driven them far from their rightful road. The darker storm had broken upon them immediately afterwards with a terrible sound and fury; but the boys had barely heard the crash in the sky above them as they carried Griff through the stony little street. They had found a doctor--two of them; they had done everything possible. Then they had been told that Griff must die, and they had gone out to look for the murderer.

He could not be far, for the village was small, and he could not have quitted the village, because the half-broken young horses that had brought him from Salerno, frightened by the incessant glare of the lightning, had become unmanageable, dragged their fastenings loose, and disappeared. In any case the plain was impa.s.sable; the roar of the sea, with the night coming on, indicated that the floods were out; they had covered the sh.o.r.e, and would soon be creeping inland; the road would be drowned and lost. Ash, therefore, could not be far.

Yet they had been unable to find him, though they had searched every house. And they had found no trace of his mother.

During these long hours four times the boys had sallied forth and hunted the street up and down. The Italians, crowded into their narrow dark dwellings from fear of the storm, had allowed them to pa.s.s freely in and out, to go from floor to floor; some of the men had even lighted their little oil lamps and gone down with them to search the shallow cellars.

But the women did not look up; they were telling their beads or kneeling before their little in-door shrines, the frightened children clinging to their skirts and crying. For both the street and the dark houses were lighted every minute or two by that unearthly blinding glare.

The village version of the story was that the two _forestieri_ had sprung at each other's throats, maddened by jealousy; poniards had been drawn, and one of them had fallen. One had fallen, indeed, but only one had attacked. And there had been no poniards: it was a well-aimed bullet from an American revolver that had struck down Griffith Carew.

The four boys, brought back each time from their search by a sudden hope that perhaps Griff might have rallied, and forced each time to yield up their hope at the sight of his death-like face, were animated in their grief by one burning determination: they would bring the murderer to justice. It was a foreign land and a remote sh.o.r.e; they were boys; and he was a bold, bad man with a wonderful brain--for they had always appreciated Ash's cleverness, though they had never liked him. In spite of all this he should not escape; they would hunt him like hounds--blood-hounds; and though it should take months, even years, of their lives, they would bring him to justice at the last.

This hot vow kept the poor lads from crying. They were very young, and their heads were throbbing with their unshed tears; there were big lumps in their throats when poor Griff, opening his dull eyes for a moment, knew them, and tried to smile in his cheery old way. But he relapsed into unconsciousness immediately. And the watch went on.