"I don"t know what you have been thinking of me all this time," he said, "if you have stooped to think of me at all."
"I have often thought of you," Avery answered. "But I had a feeling that you--that you--" she hesitated--"that you could scarcely be in sympathy with us both," she ended.
"I see." Crowther"s eyes met hers with absolute directness. "But you realize that that was a mistake," he said.
She answered him in the affirmative. Before those straight eyes of his she could not do otherwise.
"I could not express my sympathy with you," he said. "I did not even know that it would be welcome, and I could not interfere without your husband"s consent. I was bound by a promise. But--" he smiled faintly--"I told him clearly that if you came to me I should not keep that promise. I should regard it as my release."
"What have you to tell me?" Avery asked.
"Just this," he said. "It isn"t a very long story, but I don"t think you have heard it before. It"s just the story of one of the worst bits of bad luck that ever befell a man. He was only a lad of nineteen, and he went out into the world with all his life before him. He was rich and successful in every way, full of promise, brilliant. There was something so splendid about him that he seemed somehow to belong to a higher planet. He had never known failure or disgrace. But one night an evil fate befell him. He was forced to fight--against his will; and--he killed his man. It was an absolutely unforeseen result. He took heavy odds, and naturally he matched them with all the skill at his command. But it was a fair fight. I testify to that. He took no mean advantage."
Crowther"s eyes were gazing beyond Avery. He spoke with a curious deliberation as if he were describing a vision that hung before him.
"He himself was more shocked by the man"s death than anyone I have ever seen. He accepted the responsibility at once. There is a lot of n.o.bility at the back of that man"s soul. He wanted to give himself up. But I stepped in. I took the law into my own hands. I couldn"t stand by and see him ruined. I made him bolt. He went, and I saw no more of him for six years. That ends the first chapter of the story."
He paused, as if for question or comment; but Avery sat in unbroken silence. Her eyes also were fixed as it were upon something very far away.
After a moment, he resumed. "Six years after, I stopped at Monte Carlo on my way home, and I chanced upon him there. He was with his old grandfather, living a life that would have driven most young men crazy with boredom. But--I told you there was something fine about him--he treated the whole thing as a joke, and I saw that he was the apple of the old man"s eye. He hailed me as an old friend. He welcomed me back into his life as if I were only a.s.sociated with pleasant things. But I soon saw that he was not happy. The memory of that tragedy was hanging on him like a millstone. He was trying to drag himself free. But he was like a dog on a chain. He could see his liberty, but he could not reach it. And the fact that he loved a woman, and believed that he had won her love made the burden even heavier. So I gathered, though he had his intervals of reckless happiness when nothing seemed to matter. I didn"t know who the woman was at first, but I urged him strongly to tell her the truth before he married her. And then somehow, while we were walking together one night, it came out--that trick of Fate; and in his horror and despair the boy very nearly went under altogether. It was just the fineness of his nature that kept him up."
"And your help," said Avery quietly.
His eyes comprehended her for a moment. "Yes, I did my best," he said.
"But it was his own n.o.bility in the main that gave him strength. Have you never noticed that about him? He has the greatness that only comes to most men after years of struggle."
"I have noticed," Avery said, her voice very low.
Crowther went on in his slow, steady way. "Well, after that, I left. And the next thing I knew was that the old man had died, and he was married to you. You didn"t let me into the secret very soon, you know." He smiled a little. "Of course I realized that you had gone to him rather suddenly to comfort his loneliness. It was just the sort of thing I should have expected of you. And I thought--too--that he had told you all, and you had loved him well enough to forgive him. It wasn"t till I came to see you that I realized that this was not so, and I had been in the house some hours even then before it dawned on me."
Again he spoke as one describing something seen afar.
"Of course I was sorry," he said. "I knew that sooner or later you were bound to come up against it. I couldn"t help. I just waited. And as it chanced, I didn"t have to wait very long. Piers came to me one night in August, and told me that the whole thing had come out, and that you had refused to live with him any longer. I understood your feelings. It was inevitable that at first you should feel like that. But I knew you loved him. I knew that sooner or later that would make a difference. And I tried to hearten him up. For he--poor lad!--was nearly mad with trouble."
Avery"s hands closed tightly upon each other in her lap. She sat in strained silence, still gazing straight before her.
Gently Crowther finished his tale. "That"s about all there is to tell, except that from the day he left you to this, he has borne his burden like a man, and he has never once done anything unworthy of you. He is a man, Avery, not a boy any longer. He is a man you can trust, for he will never deceive you again. If he hasn"t yet found his place of repentance, it hasn"t been for lack of the seeking. If you can send him a line of forgiveness, he will go into this war with a high heart, and you will have reason to be proud of him when you meet again."
He got up and moved in his slow, ma.s.sive way across the room.
"Now you will let me give you some tea," he said. "I am sure you must be tired."
Had he seen the tears rolling down her face as she sat there? If so he gave no sign. Quietly he busied himself with his preparations, and before he came back to her, she had wiped them away.
He waited upon her with womanly gentleness, and later he went with her to the hotel at which Piers usually stayed, and saw her established there for the night.
It was not till the moment of parting that she found any words in which to express herself.
Then, with her hand in his, she whispered chokingly, "I feel as if--as if--I had failed him--just when he needed me most. He was in prison, and--I left him there."
Crowther"s steady eyes looked into hers with kindness that was full of sustaining comfort. "He has broken out of his prison," he said. "Don"t fret--don"t fret!"
Her lips were quivering painfully. She turned her face aside. "He will scarcely need me now," she said.
"Write and ask him!" said Crowther gently.
She made a piteous gesture of hopelessness. "I have got to find my own place of repentance first," she said.
"It shouldn"t wait," said Crowther. "Write tonight!"
And so for half the night Avery sat writing a letter to her husband which he was destined never to receive.
CHAPTER VIII
THE RELEASE OF THE PRISONER
How long was it since the fight round the chateau? Piers had no idea. The damp chill of the autumn night was upon him and he was cold to the bone.
It had been a desperate fight in which quarter had been neither asked nor given, hand to hand and face to face, with wild oaths and dreadful laughter. He had not noticed the tumult at the time, but the echoes of it still rang in his ears. A desperate fight against overwhelming odds! For the chateau had been strongly held, and the struggle for it had seemed t.i.tanic, albeit only a detail of a rearguard action. There had been guns there that had harried them all the previous day. It had become a matter of necessity to silence those guns. So the effort had been made, a glorious effort crowned with success. They had mastered the garrison, they had silenced the guns; and then, within an hour of their victory, disaster had come upon them. Great numbers of the enemy had swept suddenly upon them, had surrounded them and swallowed them up.
It was all over now. The tide of battle had swept on. The place was silent as the grave. He was the only man left, flung as it were upon a dust-heap in a corner of the world that had ceased to matter to anyone.
He had lain for hours unconscious till those awful chills had awakened him. Doubtless he had been left for dead among his dead comrades. He wondered why he was not dead. He had a distinct recollection of being shot through the heart. And the bullet had gone out at his back. He vividly remembered that also--the red-hot anguish as it had torn its way through him, the awful emptiness of death that had followed.
How had he escaped--if he had escaped? How had he returned from that great silence? Why had the dread Door shut against him only, imprisoning him here when all the rest had pa.s.sed through? There seemed to be some mystery about it. He tried to follow it out. Death was no difficult matter. He was convinced of that. Yet somehow Death had eluded him. He was as a man who had lost his way in a fog. Doubtless he would find it again. He did not want to wander alone in this valley of dry bones. He wanted to get free. He was sure that sooner or later that searing, red-hot bullet would do its work.
For a s.p.a.ce he drifted back into the vast sea of unconsciousness in which he had been submerged for so long. Even that was bound to lead somewhere.
Surely there was no need to worry!
But very soon it ceased to be a calm sea. It grew troubled. It began to toss. He felt himself flung from billow to billow, and the sound of a great storm rose in his ears.
He opened his eyes suddenly wide to a darkness that could be felt, and it was as though a flame of agony went through him, a raging thirst that burned him fiendishly.
Ah! He knew the meaning of that! It was horribly familiar to him. He was back in h.e.l.l--back in the torture-chamber where he had so often agonized, closed in behind those bars of iron which he had fought so often and so fruitlessly to force asunder.
He stretched out his hands and one of them came into contact with the icy cold of a dead man"s face. It was the man who had shot him, and who in his turn had been shot. He shuddered at the touch, shrank into himself.
And again the fiery anguish caught him, set him writhing; shrivelled him as parchment is shrivelled in the flame. He went through it, racked with torment, conscious of nought else in all the world, so pierced and possessed by pain that it seemed as if all the suffering that those dead men had missed were concentrated within him. He felt as if it must shatter him, soul and body, dissolve him with its sheer intensity. And yet somehow his straining flesh endured. He came through his inferno, sweating, gasping, with broken prayers and the wrung, bitter crying of smitten strength!
Again the black sea took him, bearing him to and fro, deadening his pain but giving him no rest. He tossed on the troubled waters for interminable ages. He watched a full moon rise blood-red and awful and turn gradually to a whiteness of still more appalling purity. For a long, long time he watched it, trying to recall something which eluded him, chasing a will-o"-the-wisp memory round and round the fevered labyrinths of his brain.
Then at last very suddenly it turned and confronted him. There in the old-world garden that was every moment growing more distinct and definite, he looked once more upon his wife"s face in the moonlight, saw her eyes of shrinking horror raised to his, heard her low-spoken words: "I shall never forgive you."
The vision pa.s.sed, blotted out by returning pain. He buried his head beneath his arms and groaned... .
Again--hours after, it seemed,--the great cloud of his agony lifted. He came to himself, feeling deadly sick but no longer gripped by that fiendish torture. He raised himself on his elbows and faced the blinding moonlight. It seemed to pierce him, but he forced himself to meet it. He looked forth over the silent garden.