Samuel Rutherford Crockett – The Complete Collection

Chapter 20

Then at that moment something seemed to retard them, for instead of making an end to us, they turned about and listened uncertainly.

Outside on the street, there came a great flurry of cheering people, crying like folk that weep for joy--"Vive la ligne! Vive la ligne! The soldiers of the Line! The soldiers of the Line!"

The door was burst from its hinges. The wide outer gate was filled with soldiers in dusty uniforms. The Versaillists were in the city.

"Vive la ligne!" cried the watchers on the house-tops. "Vive la ligne!" cried we, that were set like human targets against the wall. "Vive la ligne!" cried the poor wounded, staggering up on an elbow to wave a hand to the men that came to Mazas in the nick of time.

Then there was a slaughter indeed. The Communists fought like tigers, asking no quarter. They were shot down by squads, regularly and with ceremony. And we in our turn snatched their own rifles and revolvers and shot them down also.... "_Coming, Frau Wittwe! So fort!_" ...

* * * * *

And the rest--well, the rest is, that I have a wife and seven beautiful children. Yes, "The girl I left behind me," as your song sings. Ah, a joke. But the seven children are no joke, young Kerl, as you may one day find.

And why am I Oberkellner at the Prinz Karl in Heidelberg? Ah, gentlemen, I see you do not know. In the winter it is as you see it; but all the summer and autumn--what with Americans and English, it is better to be Oberkellner to Madame the Frau Wittwe than to be Prince of Kennenlippeschönberghartenau!

V

THE CASE OF JOHN ARNISTON'S CONSCIENCE

_Hail, World adored! to thee three times all hail! We at thy mighty shrine--profane, obscure With clenchèd hands beat at thy cruel door, O hear, awake, and let us in, O Baal!_

_Low at thy brazen gates ourselves we fling-- Hear us, even us, thy bondmen firm and sure, Our kin, our souls, our very God abjure! Art thou asleep, or dead, or journeying?_

_Bear us, O Ashtoreth, O Baal, that we In mystic mazes may a moment gleam, May touch and twine with hot hearts pulsing free Among thy groves by the Orontes stream_.

_Open and make us, ere our sick hearts fail, Hewers of wood within thy courts, O Baal!_

" Pro Fano ."

John Arniston's heart beat fast and high as he went homeward through the London streets. It had come at last. The blossom of love's passion-flower had been laid within his grasp. The eyes in whose light he had sunned himself for months had leaped suddenly into a sweet and passionate flame. He had seen the sun of a woman's wondrous beauty, and long followed it afar. Miriam Gale was the success of the season. It was understood that she had the entire unattached British peerage at her feet. Nevertheless, her head had touched John Arniston's shoulder to-night. He had kissed her hair. "A queen's crown of yellow gold," was what he said to himself as he walked along, the evening traffic of the Strand humming and surging about him. Because her lips had rested a moment on his, he walked light-headed as one who for the first time "tastes love's thrice-repured nectar."

He tried to remember how it happened, and in what order--so much within an hour.

He had gone in the short and dark London afternoon into her drawing-room. Something had detained him--a look, the pressure of a hand, a moment's lingering in a glance--he could not remember which. Then the crowd of gilded youth ebbed reluctantly away. There was long silence after they had gone, as Miriam Gale and he sat looking at each other in the ruddy firelight. Nor did their eyes sever till with sudden unanimous impulse they clave to one another. Then the fountains of the deep were broken up, and the deluge overwhelmed their souls.

What happened after that? Something Miriam was saying about some one named Reginald. Her voice was low and earnest, thrillingly sweet. How full of charm the infantile tremble that came into it as she looked entreatingly at him! He listened to its tones, and it was long before he troubled to follow the meaning. She was telling him something of an early and foolish marriage--of a life of pain and cruelty, of a new life and sphere of action, all leading up to the true and only love of her life. Well, what of that? He had always understood she had been married before. Enwoven in the mesh-net of her scented hair, her soft cheek warm and wet against his, all this talk seemed infinitely detached--the insignificant problems of a former existence, long solved, prehistoric, without interest. Then he spoke. He remembered well what he had said. It was that to-morrow they twain, drawing apart from all the evil tongues of the world, were to begin the old walk along the Sure Way of Happiness. The world was not for them. A better life was to be theirs. They would wander through noble and high-set cities. Italy, beloved of lovers, waited for them. Her stone-pines beckoned to them. There he would tell her about great histories, and of the lives of the knights and ladies who dwelt in the cities set on the hills.

"I am so ignorant," Miriam Gale had said, pushing his head back that she might look at his whole face at once. "I am almost afraid of you--but I love you, and I shall learn all these things."

It was all inconceivable and strange. The glamour of love mingled with the soft, fitful firelight reflected in Miriam's eyes, till they twain seemed the only realities. So that when she began to speak of her husband, it seemed at first no more to John Arniston than if she had told him that her shoeblack was yet alive. He and she had no past; only a future, instant and immediate, waiting for them to-morrow.

How many times did they not move apart after a last farewell? John Arniston could not tell, though to content himself he tried to count. Then, their eyes drawing them together again, they had stood silent in the long pause when the life throbs to and fro and the heart thunders in the ears. At last, with "To-morrow!" for an iterated watchword between them, they parted, and John Arniston found himself in the street. It was the full rush of the traffic of London; but to him it was all strangely silent. Everything ran noiselessly to-night. Newsboys mouthed the latest horror, and John Arniston never heard them. Mechanically he avoided the passers-by, but it was with no belief in their reality. To him they were but phantom shapes walking in a dream. His world was behind him--and before. The fragrance of the bliss of dreams was on his lips. His heart bounded with the thought of that "To-morrow" which they had promised to one another. The white Italian cities which he had visited alone gleamed whiter than ever before him. Was it possible that he should sit in the great square of St. Mark's with Miriam Gale by his side, the sun making a patchwork of gold and blue among the pinnacles of the Church of the Evangelist? There, too, he saw, as he walked, the Lido shore, and the long sickle sweep of the beach. The Adriatic slumbrously tossed up its toy surges, and lo! a tall girl in white walked hand-in-hand with him. He caught his breath. He had just realised that it was all to begin to-morrow. Then again he saw that glimmering white figure throw itself down in an agony of parting into the low chair, kneeling beside which his life began.

But stop--what was it after all that Miriam had been saying? Something about her husband? Had he heard aright--that he was still alive, only dead to her?--"Dead for many years," was her word. After all, it was no matter. Nothing mattered any more. His goddess had stepped down to him with open arms. He had heard the beating of her heart. She was a breathing, loving woman.

"To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow." It seemed so far away. And were there indeed other skies, blue and clear, in Italy, in which the sun shone? It seemed hard to believe with the fog of London, yellow and thick like bad pea-soup, taking him stringently in the throat.

How he found his way back to his room, walking thus in a maze, he never could recall. As the door clicked and he turned towards the fireplace, his eye fell upon a brown-paper parcel lying on the table. John Arniston opened it out in an absent way, his mind and fancy still abiding by the low chair in Miriam's room. What he saw smote him suddenly pale. He laid his hand on the mantelpiece to keep from falling. It was nothing more than a plain, thick quarto volume, covered with a worn overcoat of undressed calf-skin. At the angle of the back and on one side the rough hair was worn thin, and the skin showed through. His mother had done that, reaching it down for his father to "take the book"[2] in the old house at home. John Arniston sat down on the easy-chair with the half-unwrapped parcel on his knee. His eye read the pages without a letter printing itself on his retina. It was a book within a book, and without also, which he read. He read the tale of the smooth places on the side. No one in the world but himself could know what he read. He saw this book, his father's great house Bible, lying above a certain grey head, in the white square hole in the wall. Beneath it was a copy of the Drumfern Standard , and on the top a psalm-book in which were his mother's spectacles, put there when she took them off after reading her afternoon portion.

[Footnote 2: Engage in family worship.]

He opened the book at random: " And God spake all these words saying ... THOU SHALT NOT--" The tremendous sentence smote him fairly on the face. He threw his head violently back so that he might not read any further. The book slipped between his knees and fell heavily on the floor.

But the words which had caught his eye, "THOU SHALT NOT--" were printed in fire on the ceiling, or on his brain--he did not know which. He got up quickly, put on his hat, and went out again into the bitter night. He turned down to the left and paced the Thames Embankment. The fog was thicker than ever. Unseen watercraft with horns and steam-roarers grunted like hogs in the river. But in John Arniston's brain there was a conflict of terrible passion.

After all, it was but folklore, he said to himself. Nothing more than that. Every one knew it. All intelligent people were nowadays of one religion. The thing was manifestly absurd--the Hebrew fetich was dead--dead as Mumbo Jumbo. "Thank God!" he added inconsequently. He walked faster and faster, and on more than one occasion he brushed hurriedly against some of the brutal frequenters of that part of the world on foggy evenings. A rough lout growled belligerently at him, but shrank from the gladsome light of battle which leaped instantly into John Arniston's eye. To strike some one would have been a comfort to him at that moment.

Well, it was done with. The effete morality of a printed book was no tie upon him. The New Freedom was his--the freedom to do as he would and possess what he desired. Yet after all it was an old religion, this of John's. It has had many names; but it has never wanted priests to preach and devotees to practise its very agreeable tenets.

John Arniston stamped with his foot as he came to this decision. The fog was clearing off the river. It was no more than a mere scum on the water. There was a rift above, straight up to the stars.