Some of the old fire flashed out of the dying eyes, a hungry, despairing look.
"Kiss me, Treevor. Say you forgive me."
But I could not. For the moment I was so stunned, so overwhelmed by this sudden revelation of her deception.
A deathly physical faintness was creeping over me; a sensation like the beginning of long-denied sleep which rolls at last like an unconquerable tide, obliterating everything, through the exhausted frame, was invading my whole body. I clasped one hand mechanically round the bed-rail to support myself, the ground seemed to lift and sway beneath my feet.
I looked down on the little oval face that had lived so near to me through the last year. How pale it was now, framed in the crimson mist that stretched across the bed! At the slight, exquisite body so often held in my arms. Was I to lose them now for all time?
"I did it all for you, because I wanted you so much. Do kiss me and say you forgive. I shall not rest through a thousand years if you will not."
Grey shadows were collecting in her face, some unseen hand seemed drawing the eternal veil between us. To me, life, with all its doings, was far away. I myself was standing in the uncertain mists of death. Wide, limitless, and grey, the great plains of the hereafter seemed opening before me, dim, silent, and mysterious.
Life, with its glare of colour, its triumphant music, its crash of sound, was far behind me, almost forgotten; like clouds of indefinable tint, piled up on some distant horizon, rose the memories of its loves, its woes, its crimes.
Her weak voice calling on me to forgive seemed to have little meaning to me now. I leant forward, clasping her dying body to me, and kissed her lips, murmuring some words of consolation. Then the grey mists rose up over my eyes sealing them, and I sank slowly into the perfect darkness.
PART FIVE
THE WHITE NIGHT
CHAPTER XII
THE FLAMES OF LIFE"S FURNACE
A large room with open windows shewing a great square of hot blue sky and a palm branch that swayed in front of them, bright gold in the vivid light, was before my eyes as I lay alone, stretched out on my bed, the mosquito-curtains draped round me, and raised on the side next the windows.
How many weary days and nights had gone slowly by since that night which hung veiled in crimson mists in my memory! Horrible night of anger, of struggle, of death, of blood! Would its remembrance always cling to me like this?
Hop Lee thought I had broken my promise to him. That was the poisoned thorn that rankled and twisted and festered within me. No wonder he had cursed me and wanted to kill me. And Suzee--how well she had deceived me! I remembered her as she had sat trying to weep at the supper-table in San Francisco, telling me of the last moments of Hop Lee, her own devotion to him, and the child in their dying sufferings!
Husband and child that she had deserted so gladly! A dull anger burnt within me at the thought of that deception, and most fiercely at the knowledge that she had forced me to break my word.
Yet that anger, strongly though it flamed against her, could not wholly dry the tears that came between my lids as I thought of her.
She had loved me in her own selfish, childish way, and had risked her own life as well as mine to come to me.
After all, was it not I who had been in the wrong from the first? I had known she was married. Why had I ever looked at her with that admiration which had stirred her pa.s.sion for me? Morley had warned me.
Now it had ended like this and nearly cost us all our lives. But I, the most guilty of the three, had escaped, and they were both dead.
I appeared to have broken my promise, and now, after already injuring him so much--one who had never injured me--I had killed Hop Lee. I had taken his wife, who, he had said, was more than his life. Not satisfied with that, I had taken his life, too! How horrible it all was! I felt suffocated beneath the weight of it. But surely, surely it was Suzee who had thrown this burden on me? Yes, but I had begun the evil far back in the sunny days at Sitka.
Truly, as I had said to Morley, "One never knows in life."
I had killed him, a poor harmless, defenceless old man who had trusted me!
One thing after another had gradually pushed me on to this climax, all having their origin in those careless glances exchanged in the Sitka tea-shop.
They had thought I should die, too, all the people who had rushed into the room and found us that night. Myself unconscious, and the others dead.
The cold voice of a doctor had been the first I had heard as sense came back to me with the damp night air from the window blowing on my face:
"He"s done for, I should say, you"d better take his depositions if he can speak."
I had opened my eyes and seen some men carrying out the body of Hop Lee and the tiny pliable form of dear little Suzee that I should never see or clasp again.
The landlord had come up ashy-pale and shaking, with a note-book in his hand, and had questioned and re-questioned me, and I had answered until I fainted again.
Next, after a black gap, I came to beneath the surgeon"s probe which he was thrusting into my wound, as he would a fork into cold meat.
"He won"t get through, I should think; he has too much fever," he was saying, in the regular callous professional voice.
"But I"m going to try the effect of this new antiseptic dressing, I want to see if it does harm or not."
I opened my eyes and looked up at his hard, thin-lipped face, and he seemed somewhat disconcerted; but only jabbed his probe in a little deeper and remarked jocularly:
"Ah, I see, you"re tougher than I thought."
More oblivion, and when I next came to I knew that _they_ had both been carried away from me and buried--Hop Lee, and his wife beside him, and that that chapter in my life was, for ever and ever, closed.
Now I was in charge of a hospital nurse. A horrible creature she was, lean and hard-faced, with a straight slit across her face for mouth, and little grey, cruel eyes. Like a nightmare she hung round my bed, preventing me from getting better.
All the fiendish tortures and cruelties that she had witnessed within the hospital walls had, I suppose, made her the thing she was.
Days had pa.s.sed, and very slowly a little strength had crept back into me, enough for me to see I was not getting well as quickly as my youth and strength would let me if there were no drawback. I drew all my forces together to try and understand this, and then I noticed that regularly after each dose of physic I went back a little.
More fever, more pain in my shoulder, more delusions before the brain.
Each morning when the vitality within me had struggled through the evil effects of my medicine I was better, then came the harpy-faced nurse to the pillow--my dose--then pain and illness again.
The look on the face of the woman as I drank it was extraordinary. A sly, pleased look, as one sees on the face of a schoolboy dismembering a living fly.
One day I took the gla.s.s as usual from her, but instead of raising it to my lips, turned it upside down through the window.
The woman turned red, and then livid.
"What does that mean, sir, may I ask?"
"Simply that I am not going to take any more medicine, thank you," I replied quietly, "as I now wish to get well."
"My orders from the doctor are that you shall take it," she said grimly; "and I"ll make you."
She poured out another gla.s.s of the medicine and approached the bed, with the intention, it seemed, of opening my mouth and pouring it down. But I had had no weakening, sense-destroying drug that morning, and nature was rapidly curing me.