Samuel Rutherford Crockett – The Complete Collection

Chapter 21

"AND GOD SPAKE ALL THESE WORDS--."

"No," he said, over and over, "I shall not give her up. It is preposterous. Yet my father believed it. He died with his hand on the old Bible, his finger in the leaves--my mother--"

"AND GOD SPAKE ALL THESE WORDS--." The sentence seemed to flash through the rift over the shot-tower--to tingle down from the stars.

There are no true perverts. When man strips him to the bare buff, he is of the complexion his mother bestowed upon him. When his life's card-castle, laboriously piled, tumbles ignominious, he is again of his mother's religion.

"AND GOD--."

John Arniston stepped to the edge of the parapet. He looked over into the slow, swirling black water. It was a quick way that--but no--it was not to be his way. He looked at his watch. It was time to go to the office. He had an article to do. As well do that as anything. But first he would write a letter to her.

Shut in his room, his hand flying swiftly lest it should turn back in spite of him, John Arniston wrote a letter to Miriam Gale--a letter that was all one lie. He could not tell her the true reason why he would not go on the morrow. Who was he, that he should put himself in the attitude of being holier than Miriam Gale? It was certainly not because he did not wish to go--or that he thought it wrong. Simply, his father's calf-skin Bible barred the way, and he could no more pass over it than he could have trampled over his mother's body to his desire.

It was done. The letter was written. What was the particular excuse, invented fiercely at the moment, there is no use writing down here to cumber the page. John Arniston cheerfully gave himself over to the recording angel. Yet the ninth commandment is of equal interpretation, though it may be somewhat less clearly and tersely expressed than the seventh.

He went out and posted his note at a pillar-box in a quiet street with his own hand. The postman had just finished clearing when John came to thrust in the letter to Miriam Gale. The envelope slid into an empty receiver as the postman clicked the key. He turned to John with a look which said--"Too late that time, sir!" But John never so much as noticed that there was a postman by his side, who shouldered his bags with an air of official detachment. John Arniston went back to his room, and while he waited for a book of reference (for articles must be written so long as the pillars of the firmament stand) he lifted an evening paper which lay on the table. He ran his eye by instinct over the displayed cross headings. His eye caught a name. "Found Drowned at Battersea Bridge--Reginald Gale."

"Reginald Gale," said John to himself--"where did I hear that name?"

Like a flash, every word that Miriam had told him about her worthless husband--his treatment of her, his desertion within a few days of her marriage--stood plain before him as if he had been reading the thing in proof.... Miriam Gale was a free woman.

And his pitiable lying letter? It was posted--lurking in the pillar-box round the corner, waiting to speed on its way to break the heart of the girl, who had been willing to risk all, and count the world well lost for the sake of him.

He seized his hat and ran down-stairs, taking the steps half a dozen at a time. He met the boy coming up with the book. He passed as if he had stepped over the top of him. The boy turned and gazed open-mouthed. The gentlemen at the office were all of them funny upon occasion, but John Arniston had never had the symptoms before.

"He's got a crisis!" said the boy to himself, clutching at an explanation he had heard once given in the sub-editor's room.

For an hour John Arniston paced to and fro before that pillar-box, timing the passing policeman, praying that the postman who came to clear it might prove corruptible.

Would he never come? It appeared upon the white enamelled plate that the box was to be cleared in an hour. But he seemed to have waited seven hours in hell already. The policeman gazed at him suspiciously. A long row of jewellers' shops was just round the corner, and he might be a professional man of standing--in spite of the fur-collar of his coat--with an immediate interest in jewellery.

The postman came at last. He was a young, alert, beardless man, who whistled as he came. John Arniston was instantly beside him as he stooped to unlock the little iron door.

"See here," he said eagerly, in a low voice, "I have made a mistake in posting a letter. Two lives depend on it. I'll give you twenty pounds in notes into your hand now, if you let me take back the letter at the bottom of that pillar!"

"Sorry--can't do it, sir--more than my place is worth. Besides, how do I know that you put in that letter? It may be a jewel letter from one of them coves over there!"

And he jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

John Arniston could meet that argument.

"You can feel it," he said; "try if there is anything in it, coin or jewels--you could tell, couldn't you?"

The man laughed.

"Might be notes, sir, like them in your hand--couldn't do it, indeed, sir."

The devil leaped in the hot Scots blood of John Arniston.

He caught the kneeling servant of Her Majesty's noblest monopoly by the throat, as he paused smiling with the door of the pillar-box open and the light of the street-lamp falling on the single letter which lay within. The clutch was no light one, and the man's life gurgled in his throat.

John Arniston snatched the letter, glanced once at the address. It was his own. There was, indeed, no other. Hurriedly he thrust the four notes into the hand of the half-choked postman. Then he turned and ran, for the windows of many tall houses were spying upon him. He dived here and there among archways and passages, manoeuvred through the purlieus of the market, and so back into the offices of his paper.

"And where is that _Dictionary of National Biography_?" asked John Arniston of the boy. The precious letter for which he had risked penal servitude and the cat in the prisons of his country for robbery of the Imperial mails (accompanied with violence), was blazing on the fire. Then, with professional readiness, John Arniston wrote a column and a half upon the modern lessons to be drawn from the fact that Queen Anne was dead. It was off-day at the paper, Parliament was not sitting, and the columns opposite the publishers' advertisements needed filling, or these gentlemen would grumble. The paper had a genuine, if somewhat spasmodic, attachment to letters. And from this John Arniston derived a considerable part of his income.

When he went back to his room he found that his landlady had been in attending to the fire. She had also lifted the fallen Bible, on which he could now look with some complacency--so strange a thing is the conscience.

On the worn hair covering of the old Bible lay a letter. It was from Miriam--a letter written as hastily as his own had been, with pitiful tremblings, and watered with tears. It told him, through a maze of burning love, among other things that she had been a wicked woman to listen to his words--and that while her husband lived she must never see him again. In time, doubtless, he would find some one worthier, some one who would not wreck his life, as for one mad half-hour his despairing Miriam had been willing to do. Finally, he would forgive her and forget her. But she was his own--he was to remember that.

In half an hour John Arniston was at the mortuary. Of course, he found a pressman there with a notebook before him. With him he arranged what should be said the next morning, and how the inquest should be reported. There was no doubt about the identity, and John Arniston soon possessed the proofs of it. But, after all, there was no need that the British public should know more than it already knew, or that the name of Miriam Gale should be connected with the drowned wretch, whose soddenly friendly leer struck John Arniston cold, as though he also had been in the Thames water that night.

So all through the darkness he paced in front of the house of the Beloved. His letter to her, written on leaves of his notebook, in place of that which he had destroyed, went in with the morning's milk. In half an hour after he was with her. And when he came out again he had seen a wonderful thing--a beautiful woman to whom emotion was life, and the expression of it second nature, running through the gamut of twenty moods in a quarter of an hour. At the end, John departed in search of a licence and a church. And Miriam Gale put her considering finger to her lip, and said, "Let me see--which dresses shall I take?"

The highway robbery was never heard of. The excellent plaster which John Arniston left in the hand of the official had salved effectively the rude constriction of his throat, where John's right hand had closed upon it.

* * * * *

It was even better to sit with Miriam Arniston in reality in the great sun-lit square of St. Mark's than it had been in fantasy with Miriam Gale.

The only disappointment was, that the pigeons of the Square were certainly fatter and greedier than the pictured cloud of doves, which in his day-dream he had seen flash the under-side of their wings at his love as they checked themselves to alight at her feet.

But on Lido side there was no such rift in the lute's perfection. The sands, the wheeling sea-birds, the tall girl in white whose hand he held--all these were even as he had imagined them. Thither they came every day, passing along the straight dusty avenue, and then wandering for hours picking shells. They talked only when the mood took them, and in the pauses they listened idly to the slumbrous pulsations of Adria. John Arniston had lied at large in the letter he had written to his love. He had assaulted a man who righteously withstood him in the discharge of his duty, in order to steal that letter back again. Yet his conscience was wholly void of offence in the matter. The heavens smiled upon his bride and himself. There was now no stern voice to break through upon his blissful self-approval.

Why there should be this favouritism among the commandments, was not clear to John. Indeed, the thing did not trouble him. He was no casuist. He only knew that the way was clear to Miriam Gale, and he went to her the swiftest way.

But there were, for all that, the elements of a very pretty dilemma in the psychology of morals in the case of Miriam Gale and John Arniston. True, the calf-skin Bible said when it was consulted, "The letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive."

But, after all, that might prove upon examination to have nothing to do with the matter.

VI

THE GLISTERING BEACHES

_For wafts of unforgotten music come, All unawares, into my lonely room, To thrill me with the memories of the past-- Sometimes a tender voice from out the gloom, A light hand on the keys, a shadow cast Upon a learned tome That blurs somewhat Alpha and Omega, A touch upon my shoulder, a pale face, Upon whose perfect curves the firelight plays, Or love-lit eyes, the sweetest e'er I saw_.