The Judgment House Part 47

"So, Baas."

With a low cry Byng ran forward, the sjambok swung through the air, and the terrible whip descended on the crouching half-caste.

Krool gave one cry and fell back a little, but he made no attempt to resist.

Suddenly Byng went to a window and threw it open.

"You can jump from there or take the sjambok. Which?" he said with a pa.s.sion not that of a man wholly sane. "Which?"

Krool's wild, sullen, trembling look sought the window, but he had no heart for that enterprise--thirty feet to the pavement below.

"The sjambok, Baas," he said.

Once again Byng moved forward on him, and once again Krool's cry rang out, but not so loud. It was like that of an animal in torture.

In the next room, Wallstein and Stafford and the others heard it, and understood. Whispering together they listened, and Stafford shrank away to the far side of the room; but more than one face showed pleasure in the sound of the whip and the moaning.

It went on and on.

Barry Whalen, however, was possessed of a kind of fear, and presently his face became troubled. This punishment was terrible. Byng might kill the man, and all would be as bad as could be. Stafford came to him.

"You had better go in," he said. "We ought to intervene. If you don't, I will. Listen...."

It was a strange sound to hear in this heart of civilization. It belonged to the barbaric places of the earth, where there was no law, where every pioneer was his own cadi.

With set face Barry Whalen entered the room. Byng paused for an instant and looked at him with burning, glazed eyes that scarcely realized him.

"Open that door," he said, presently, and Barry Whalen opened the door which led into the big hall.

"Open all down to the street," Byng said, and Barry Whalen went forward quickly.

Like some wild beast Krool crouched and stumbled and moaned as he ran down the staircase, through the outer hall, while a servant with scared face saw Byng rain savage blows upon the hated figure.

On the pavement outside the house, Krool staggered, stumbled, and fell down; but he slowly gathered himself up, and turned to the doorway, where Byng stood panting with the sjambok in his hand.

"Baas!--Baas!" Krool said with livid face, and then he crept painfully away along the street wall.

A policeman crossed the road with a questioning frown and the apparent purpose of causing trouble, but Barry Whalen whispered in his ear, and told him to call that evening and he would hear all about it. Meanwhile a five-pound note in a quick palm was a guarantee of good faith.

Presently a half-dozen people began to gather near the door, but the benevolent policeman moved them on.

At the top of the staircase Jasmine met her husband. She s.h.i.+vered as he came up towards her.

"Will you come to me when you have finished your business?" she said, and she took the sjambok gently from his hand.

He scarcely realized her. He was in a dream; but he smiled at her, and nodded, and pa.s.sed on to where the others awaited him.

CHAPTER XXVIII

"THE BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM"

Slowly Jasmine returned to her boudoir. Laying the sjambok on the table among the books in delicate bindings and the bowls of flowers, she stood and looked at it with confused senses for a long time. At last a wan smile stole to her lips, but it did not reach her eyes. They remained absorbed and searching, and were made painfully sad by the wide, dark lines under them. Her fair skin was fairer than ever, but it was delicately faded, giving her a look of pensiveness, while yet there was that in her carriage and at her mouth which suggested strength and will and new forces at work in her. She carried her head, weighted by its splendour of golden hair, as an Eastern woman carries a goulah of water. There was something pathetic yet self-reliant in the whole figure. The pa.s.sion slumbering in the eyes, however, might at any moment burst forth in some wild relinquishment of control and self-restraint.

"He did what I should have liked to do," she said aloud. "We are not so different, after all. He is primitive at bottom, and so am I. He gets carried away by his emotions, and so do I."

She took up the whip, examined it, felt its weight, and drew it with a swift jerk through the air.

"I did not even shrink when Krool came stumbling down the stairs, with this cutting his flesh," she said to herself. "Somehow it all seemed natural and right. What has come to me? Are all my finer senses dead?

Am I just one of the crude human things who lived a million years ago, and who lives again as crude as those; with only the outer things changed? Then I wore the skins of wild animals, and now I do the same, just the same; with what we call more taste perhaps, because we have ceased to see the beauty in the natural thing."

She touched the little band of grey fur at the sleeve of her clinging velvet gown. "Just a little distance away--that is all."

Suddenly a light flashed up in her eyes, and her face flushed as though some one had angered her. She seized the whip again. "Yes, I could have seen him whipped to death before my eyes--the coward, the abject coward. He did not speak for me; he did not defend me; he did not deny.

He let Ian think--death was too kind to him. How dared he hurt me so!

... Death is so easy a way out, but he would not have taken it. No, no, no, it was not suicide; some one killed him. He could never have taken his own life--never. He had not the courage.... No; he died of poison or was strangled. Who did it? Who did it? Was it Rudyard? Was it...?

Oh, it wears me out--thinking, thinking, thinking!"

She sat down and buried her face in her hands. "I am doomed--doomed,"

she moaned. "I was doomed from the start. It must always have been so, whatever I did. I would do it again, whatever I did; I know I would do it again, being what I was. It was in my veins, in my blood from the start, from the very first days of my life."

All at once there flashed through her mind again, as on that night so many centuries ago, when she had slept the last sleep of her life as it was, Swinburne's lines on Baudelaire:

"There is no help for these things, none to mend and none to mar; Not all our songs, oh, friend, can make death clear Or make life durable...."

"'There is no help for these things,'" she repeated with a sigh which seemed to tear her heart in twain. "All gone--all. What is there left to do? If death could make it better for any one, how easy! But everything would be known--somehow the world would know, and every one would suffer more. Not now--no, not now. I must live on, but not here.

I must go away. I must find a place to go where Rudyard will not come.

There is no place so far but it is not far enough. I am twenty-five, and all is over--all is done for me. I have nothing that I want to keep, there is nothing that I want to do except to go--to go and to be alone. Alone, always alone now. It is either that, or be Jezebel, or--"

The door opened, and the servant brought a card to her. "His Excellency, the Moravian amba.s.sador," the footman said.

"Monsieur Mennaval?" she asked, mechanically, as though scarcely realizing what he had said.

"Yes, ma'am, Mr. Mennaval."

"Please say I am indisposed, and am sorry I cannot receive him to-day,"

she said.

"Very good, ma'am." The footman turned to go, then came back.

"Shall I tell the maid you want her?" he asked, respectfully.

"No, why should you?" she asked.

"I thought you looked a bit queer, ma'am," he responded, hastily. "I beg your pardon, ma'am."