The Purple Cloud Part 26

'Or _seemed_ to,' says she--'for a time: as when a stleam flows north a little, and the sea is to the south: but it is bound for the sea all the time, and will turn again. Destiny never could, and cannot yet, be judged, for it is not finished: and our lace should follow blindly whither it points, sure that thlough many curves it leads the world to our G.o.d.'

'Our G.o.d indeed!' I cried, getting very excited: 'girl! you talk speciously, but falsely! whence have you these thoughts in that head of yours? Girl! you talk of "our race"! But there are only two of us left?

Are you talking _at_ me, Leda? Do not _I_ follow Destiny?'

'You?' she sighed, with down-bent face: 'ah, poor me!'

'What should I do if I followed it?' said I, with a crazy curiosity.

Her face hung lower, paler, in trouble: and she said:

'You would come now and sit near me here. You would not be there where you are. You would be always and for ever near me....'

My good G.o.d! I felt my face redden.

'Oh, I could not _tell_ you...!' I cried: 'you talk the most disastrous...!

you lack all responsibility...! Never, never...!'

Her face now was covered with her left hand, her right on the tiller: and bitingly she said, with a touch of venom:

'I could _make_ you come--_now_, if I chose: but I will not: I will wait upon my G.o.d....'

'_Make_ me!' I cried: 'Leda! How make me?'

'I could cly before you, as I cly often and often ... in seclet ... for my childlen....'

'_You_ cry in secret? This is news--'

'Yes, yes, I cly. Is not the burden of the world heavy upon me, too? and the work I have to do _vely, vely_ gleat? And often and often I cly in seclet, thinking of it: and I could cly now if I chose, for you love your little girl so much, that you could not lesist me one minute....'

Now I saw the push and tortion and trembling of her poor little under-lip, boding tears: and at once a flame was in me which was altogether beyond control; and crying out: 'why, my poor dear,' I found myself in the act of rus.h.i.+ng through the staggering boat to take her to me.

Mid-way, however, I was saved: a whisper, intense as lightning, arrested me: 'Forward is no escape, nor backward, but _sideward_ there may be a way!' And at a sudden impulse, before I knew what I was doing, I was in the water swimming.

The smaller of the islands was two hundred yards away, and thither I swam, rested some minutes, and thence to the Castle. I did not once look behind me.

Well, from 11 A.M. till five in the afternoon, I thought it all out, lying in the damp flannels on my face on the sofa in the recess beside my bed, where it was quite dark behind the tattered piece of arras: and what things I suffered that day, and what deeps I sounded, and what prayers I prayed, G.o.d knows. What infinitely complicated the awful problem was this thought in my head: that to kill her would be far more merciful to her than to leave her alone, having killed myself: and, Heaven knows, it was for her alone that I thought, not at all caring for myself. To kill her was better: but to kill her with my own hands--that was too hard to expect of a poor devil like me, a poor common son of Adam, after all, and never any sublime self-immolator, as two or three of them were. And hours I lay there with brows convulsed in an agony, groaning only those words: 'To kill her! to kill her!' thinking sometimes that I should be merciful to myself too, and die, and let her live, and not care, since, after my death, I would not see her suffer, for the dead know not anything: and to expect me to kill her with my own hand was a little too much. Yet that one or other of us must die was perfectly certain, for I knew that I was just on the brink of failing in my oath, and matters here had reached an obvious crisis: unless we could make up our minds to part...? putting the width of the earth between us? That conception occurred to me: and in the turmoil of my thoughts it seemed a possibility. Finally, about 5 P.M., I resolved upon something: and first I leapt up, went down and across the house into the a.r.s.enal, chose a small revolver, fitted it with cartridge, took it up-stairs, lubricated it with lamp-oil, went down and out across the drawbridge, walked two miles beyond the village, shot the revolver at a tree, found its action accurate, and started back. When I came to the Castle, I walked along the island to the outer end, and looked up: there were her pretty cream Valenciennes, put up by herself, waving inward before the light lake-breeze at one open oriel; and I knew that she was in the Castle, for I felt it: and always, always, when she was within, I knew, for I felt her with me; and always when she was away, I knew, I felt, for the air had a dreadful drought, and a barrenness, in it. And I looked up for a time to see if she would come to the window, and then I called, and she appeared. And I said to her: 'Come down here.'

Just here there is a little rock-path to the south, going down to the water between rocks mixed with shrub-like little trees, three yards long: a path, or a lane, one might call it, for at the lower end the rocks and trees reach well over a tall man's head. There she had tied my boat to a slender linden-trunk: and sadder now than Gethsemane that familiar boat seemed to my eyes, for I knew very well that I should never enter it more. I walked up and down the path, awaiting her: and from the jacket-pocket in which lay the revolver I drew a box of Swedish matches, from it took two matches, and broke off a bit from the plain end of one; and the two I held between my left thumb and forefinger joint, the phosphorus ends level and visible, the other ends invisible: and I awaited her, pacing fast, and my brow was as stern as Azrael and Rhadamanthus.

She came, very pale, poor thing, and flurried, breathing fast. And 'Leda,' I said, meeting her in the middle of the lane, and going straight to the point, 'we are to part, as you guess--for ever, as you guess--for I see very well by your face that you guess. I, too, am very sorry, my little child, and heavy is my heart. To leave you ... alone ... in the world ... is--death for me. But it must, ah it must, be done.'

Her face suddenly turned as sallow as the dead were, when the shroud was already on, and the coffin had become a stale added piece of room-furniture by the bed-side; but in recording that fact, I record also this other: that, accompanying this mortal sallowness, which painfully shewed up her poor freckles, was a steady smile, a little turned-down: a smile of steady, of slightly disdainful--Confidence.

She did not say anything: so I went on.

'I have thought long,' said I, 'and I have made a plan--a plan which cannot be effective without _your_ consent and co-operation: and the plan is this: we go from this place together--this same night--to some unknown spot, some town, say a hundred miles hence--by train. There I get two motors, and I in one, and you in the other, we separate, going different ways. We shall thus never be able, however much we may want to, to rediscover each other in all this wide world. That is my plan.'

She looked me in the face, smiling her smile: and the answer was not long in coming.

'I will go in the tlain with you,' says she with slow decisiveness: 'but where you leave me, there I will stay, till I die; and I will patiently wait till my G.o.d convert you, and send you back to me.'

'That means that you refuse to do what I say?'

'Yes,' said she, bowing the head with great dignity.

'Well, you speak, not like a girl, Leda,' said I, 'but like a full woman now. But still, reflect a minute.... O reflect! If you stayed where I left you, I _should_ go back to you, and pretty soon, too: I know that I should. Tell me, then--reflect well, and tell me--do you definitely refuse to part with me?'

The answer was pretty prompt, cool, and firm:

'Yes; I lefuse.'

I left her then, took a turn down the path, and came back.

'Then,' said I, 'here are two matches in my grasp: be good enough to draw one.'

_Now_ she was. .h.i.t to the heart: I saw her eyes widen to the width of horror, with a gla.s.sy stare: she had read of the drawing of lots in the Bible: she knew that it meant death for me, or for her.

But she obeyed without a word, after one backward start and then a brief hovering in decision of thumb and forefinger over my held-out hand. I had fixed it in my mind that if she drew the shorter of the matches, then she should die; if the longer, then I should die.

She drew the shorter....

This was only what I should have expected: for I knew that G.o.d loved her, and hated me.

But instantly upon the first shock of the enormity that I should be her executioner, I made my resolve: to drop shot, too, at the moment after she dropped shot, so disposing my body, that it would fall half upon her, and half by her, so that we might be close always: and that would not be so bad, after all.

With a sudden movement I s.n.a.t.c.hed the revolver from my pocket: she did not move, except her white lips, which, I think, whispered:

'_Not yet_....'

I stood with hanging arm, forefinger on trigger, looking at her. I saw her glance once at the weapon, and then she fixed her eyes upwards upon my face: and now that same smile, which had disappeared, was on her lips again, meaning confidence, meaning disdain.

I waited for her to open her mouth to say something--to stop that smile--that I might shoot her quick and sudden: and she would not, knowing that I could not kill her while she was smiling; and suddenly, all my pity and love for her changed into a strange resentment and rage against her, for she was purposely making hard for me what I was doing for her sake: and the bitter thought was in my mind: 'You are nothing to me: if you want to die, you do your own killing; and I will do my own killing.' And without one word to her, I strode away, and left her there.

I see now that this whole drawing of lots was nothing more than a farce: I never could have killed her, smiling, or no smiling: for to each thing and man is given a certain strength: and a thing cannot be stronger than its strength, strive as it may: it is so strong, and no stronger, and there is an end of the matter.

I walked up to the Grand Bailli's _bureau_, a room about twenty-five feet from the ground. By this time it was getting pretty dark, but I could see, by peering, the face of a grandfather's-clock which I had long since set going, and kept wound. It is on the north side of the room, over the writing-desk opposite the oriels. It then pointed to half-past six, and in order to fix some definite moment for the bitter effort of the mortal act, I said: 'At Seven.' I then locked the door which opens upon three little steps near the desk, and also the stair-door; and I began to pace the chamber. There was not a breath of air here, and I was hot; I seemed to be stifling, tore open my s.h.i.+rt at the throat, and opened the lower half of the central mullion-s.p.a.ce of one oriel. Some minutes later, at twenty-five to seven, I lit two candles on the desk, and sat to write to her, the pistol at my right hand; but I had hardly begun, when I thought that I heard a sound at the three-step door, which was only four feet to my left: a sound which resembled a sc.r.a.ping of her slipper; I stole to the door, and crouched, listening: but I could hear nothing further. I then returned to the desk, and set to writing, giving her some last directions for her life, telling her why I died, how I loved her, much better than my own soul, begging her to love me always, and to live on to please me, but if she _would_ die, then to be sure to die near me. Tears were pouring down my face, when, turning, I saw her standing in a terrified pose hardly two feet behind me. The absolute stealth which had brought and put her there, unknown to me, was like miracle: for the ladder, whose top I saw intruding into the open oriel, I knew well, having often seen it in a room below, and its length was quite thirty feet, nor could its weight be trifling: yet I had heard not one hint of its impact upon the window.

But there, at all events, she was, wan as a ghost.

Immediately, as my consciousness realised her, my hand instinctively went out to secure the weapon: but she darted upon it, and was an instant before me. I flew after her to wrench it away, but she flew, too: and before I caught her, had thrown it cleanly through two rungs of the ladder and the window. I dashed to the window, and after a hurried peer thought that I saw it below at the foot of a rock; away I flew to the stair-door, wrung open the lock, and down the stairs, three at a time, I ran to recover it. I remember being rather surprised that she did not follow, forgetting all about the ladder.

But with a horrid shock I was reminded of it the moment I reached the bottom, before ever I had pa.s.sed from the house: for I heard the report of the weapon--that crack, my G.o.d! and crying out: 'Well, Lord, she has died for me, then!' I tottered forward, and tumbled upon her, where she lay under the incline of the ladder in her blood.