Chapter IV.

The Eleventh Hour

As I drew near the neighbourhood of our house my fears grew so that

I was compelled by sheer breathlessness and the trembling of my limbs

to slacken my pace. I was sick with terror. In my mind, pictures,

vague and nebulous but unspeakably dreadful, rose like the visions of

a nightmare. I clutched the precious order of release in my pocket and

set my teeth, trying not to think of what I might find at my journey’s

end.

At last I came in sight of the house. It was all dark save two of the

upper windows--those of the servants’ bedrooms. The servants, then,

were going to bed as usual, for ours was an early household. This

seemed re-assuring, but only to a slight degree; for even if----

I opened the gate softly--I do not know why, but somehow I

instinctively avoided noise of any kind--and running up the garden

path, let myself in quietly with my latch-key. With one quick and

fearful glance around the darkened hall, I stole up to the hat-stand.

Apparently my father had not yet come home, for his stick was not in

the stand, and one of his hats was missing. I looked at the tall clock

and noted that it was not yet half-past ten; I peered out through the

open doorway, down the dark road, and listened awhile for the sound of

footsteps; then, slipping the letter into the letter-box--which I

could see contained no other missives--I lit one of the candles from

the hall table, and, having peeped into the study, the book-room and

the workshop, stole silently up the stairs.

First, I went to my father’s bedroom, and, by the glimmer of gas that

the maid had left burning, and the light of my candle, inspected it

narrowly. I looked over the trifles on the mantelpiece and on the

dressing-table, and even opened the little medicine-cupboard to run my

eye over the collection of bottles and boxes, pausing from time to

time that I might listen for footsteps, strange or familiar, as Fate

might decree. But pry as I would, there was nothing unusual, nothing

on which the most eager suspicion might fasten. All the details of

that room were familiar to me, for it had been my daily task since my

girlhood to look them over and see that my father’s orderly

arrangements were not disturbed by the servants; and everything was in

its place, and nothing new or strange or sinister had made its

appearance.

When I had finished my inspection, I stole softly along the corridor

to my own bedroom, which was at the head of the stairs, and, turning

up the gas, but leaving the door ajar, began slowly to undress,

listening intently the while for any sounds that might confirm or

dispel my fears. The house was very quiet and still; so quiet that the

tinkle of the water, as I poured it out from the ewer, struck with

disturbing harshness on my ear, and even the ticking of the little

clock and my own slippered footfalls seemed an impertinent intrusion

into that expectant silence.

It was a few minutes past eleven when the sound of a latch-key and the

gentle closing of the hall door sent the blood tingling to my very

finger-tips. No footsteps had been audible on the garden path, but

this, in itself, was characteristic; for my father and I were alike in

that we both disliked noise and habitually moved about softly,

avoiding the slamming of doors or the production in any way of jarring

sounds.

I crept on tip-toe to the door and listened. A stick was carefully put

down in the hall-stand, and then I thought--but was not quite

sure--that I heard my father unlock the letter-box. A few seconds

later I caught a faint creak, which I recognised as proceeding from

the study door, and, after a short interval, the creak was repeated

and the door closed. Then the hall gas was turned out and soft

footfalls began to ascend the stairs.

“Is that you, Pater, dear?” I asked.

“Is it I, indeed, O! wicked and disobedient child and likewise minx!”

was the welcome answer. “Didn’t I tell you to go to bed?”

“Yes, you did; and I am going. But I thought I would like to see you

safely home from your roysterings.”

“_Mures ratti!_” he exclaimed, as he came into the light from my open

door. “It is poor old Queen Anne who has been keeping you out of your

little nest. I know you.”

Here he gave a gentle tug at one of the tails into which I had plaited

my hair, and, having kissed me on the tip of my nose, continued:

“And you look as tired as the proverbial dog--which is the only kind

of dog that ever does get tired. Now go to bed and sleep like a young

dormouse. Good-night, Jimmy, dear.”

With the aid of the convenient tail, he drew my face to his and kissed

me again; then he went off along the corridor singing very softly, but

just audibly to me:

“Her father he makes cabbage nets

And in the streets does cry ’em;

Her mother she sells laces long----”

Here a rapid diminuendo indicated the closing of the door, and the

silence that had been so agreeably broken once again settled down upon

the house. Still, I stood at the open door, looking out into the

darkness. Had my father seen the letter? He had seemed very cheerful.

But then, he would have seemed very cheerful if he had been walking to

the scaffold or the stake. That was his nature. Yet his gaiety had

appeared to me more genuine than that which he had exhibited earlier

in the evening. However, there was no need to speculate; the question

could easily be set at rest. Taking the match-box from my candlestick,

I stole silently down the stairs, steadying myself by the hand-rail,

and groped my way across the hall until I reached the door. Then I

struck a match, and by its light, peered through the wire grating into

the letter-box.

It was empty. The letter had been taken out.

I blew out the match, and, having dropped it into the salver on the

table, crept back up the stairs to my room. Closing the door silently,

I made my final preparations, turned out the light and crept into bed,

feeling in the sudden ecstasy of relief that I could now shake off all

care and bury the anxieties and alarms of this dreadful day in

slumber.

My father was saved! No haunting fear of imminent tragedy, no dread of

impending ruin and disgrace, remained to murder sleep or mingle it

with frightful visions. My father was saved. At the eleventh hour I

had made my bid for his life and liberty; and the eleventh hour had

not been too late.

But it was long--very long before sleep came to shut out for a time

the realities of life. The blessed feeling of escape from this

appalling peril, the sense of restored security, was presently

followed by the chill of reaction. For the end was not yet. I had bid

for my father’s life and had bought it in; but the price remained to

be paid. And only now, when I could consider it undisturbed by terror

for my father’s safety, did I begin to realise fully how bitter a

price it was. Not that I would have gone back on my bargain, for I had

made it with my eyes open; and would have made it over again if the

need had been. But it was a terrible price. I had sold my

birth-right--my precious woman’s birth-right to choose my own

mate--for a mess of pottage. It was a price that I should have to pay,

and go on paying as long as life lasted.

Hour after hour did I lie, gazing wide-eyed into the darkness, letting

my thoughts flit hither and thither, now into the quiet, untroubled

past, now into the dim and desolate future, whence they would come

hurrying back affrighted. But always, whithersoever they wandered,

behind them rose, now vague and remote, now horribly distinct, that

unwieldy figure with the impassive oriental face; even, as to the eyes

of the fisherman in the Arabian tale, the smoke from the magic jar

shaped itself into the menacing form of the gigantic Jinn.

I tried to consider dispassionately the character of Mr. Otway. It was

very difficult. For had he not come into our life like some malignant

spirit, to dispel with a word and in the twinkling of an eye, all the

peace and happiness of our quiet home? To snap off short my serene

companionship with my father? To turn into dust and ashes all the

vaguely-sweet dreams of my maidenhood? To shut out the warm and hazy

sunshine from my future and fill the firmament with unrelieved, leaden

greyness? Still, I tried to consider him fairly. Callously, cynically,

he had driven his Juggernaut car over my father and me, his eyes fixed

upon his own desires and seeing nothing else. He was an absolute

egoist. That was undeniable. For some reason, he wished to marry me;

and to achieve that wish he had been willing to put us both on the

rack, and, with passionless composure, to turn the screw until we

yielded. It was not a pleasant thing to think of.

On the other hand, he seemed, in his way, to be a just man. By no

hair’s breadth had he sought to modify the terms that he had first

proposed; indeed, in his letter to me he had treated the loan to my

father as an almost unconditional gift, and the other details of our

agreement he had expressed in writing fully and fairly, with no

attempt at evasion. Nor was he niggardly. Five thousand pounds is a

large sum to pay for the privilege of marrying an unwilling bride.

Under other circumstances I might have appreciated the implied

compliment. Now, I could only admit that, according to his lights, he

seemed not ungenerous.

But when I considered him as the companion with whom I must share the

remainder of my life--or, at least, that part of it which

mattered--the thought was almost unendurable. To live, day after day

and year after year, under the same roof with this huge, dull,

uncomely man; to sit at table with him, to walk abroad by his side, to

spend interminable evenings alone with him: it was appalling. I could

hardly bear to think of it. And yet the horrible reality would be upon

me in the course of a few swiftly-passing days.

Nor was it a question of mere companionship--but from this aspect I

hurriedly averted my thoughts in sheer cowardice. I dared not let

myself think even for a moment of what marriage actually meant. Under

normal conditions it may be permitted to the modesty of an unwedded

girl to cast an occasional glance, half-shy and not wholly

unpleasurable, at the more intimate relations of married life: but to

me, if the thought would rise unbidden, it could call up nought but

the quick flush of shame and loathing whereat I would bury my face in

the pillow with a moan of shuddering disgust.

It was a relief to turn from the distressful present and the

unthinkable future to the past, or even to the future that might have

been. For, like most other girls, I had had my day-dreams. The

companionship with my father had been happy and full of interest; but

it had never seemed final. I had looked on it as no more than the

prologue to the real life, which lay, for the moment, hidden behind

the near horizon of my maidenhood. And as to that reality, though it

offered but a vague picture, yet it had a certain definiteness. To

many modern girls, ambition seems to connect itself with the academy

and the laboratory, with the platform and the forum. They appear to

hanker after fame, or even mere notoriety, and would contend with

men--who have nothing better to do--for the high places in politics,

in science or in literature. I had read the impassioned demands of

some of these women for political and economic equality with men, and

had looked at them with a certain dim surprise to see them so eager to

gather this Dead Sea fruit and turn their backs upon the Tree of Life,

with its golden burden of love and blessed motherhood. Ambition of

that kind had no message for me. So far my mind was perfectly clear.

As to the terms in which I conceived the final realities, the blossom

and fructification of a woman’s life, I am less clear. A home of my

own like the pleasant, peaceful home that my father had made; a man of

my own, in whom I could feel pride and by whom I could be linked to

the greater world outside; and a sweet brood of little people in whom

my youth could be renewed and for whom I could even cherish wider

ambitions: this was probably what my rambling thoughts would have

pictured if they could have been gathered up and brought to a definite

focus. But they never had been. The necessary refracting medium had

been absent. For what the burning-glass is to the sunbeam, the actual

love of some particular man is to the opening mind of a young girl,

bringing the scattered rays of thought to a single bright spot in

which the wished-for future becomes sharp and distinct. And this

influence, in its completeness, had never come into my life. The

undoubted liking that I had for the society of men was due, chiefly,

to their larger interests and wider knowledge. Of experiences

sentimental or romantic there had been none.

And yet the little god had not entirely forgotten me. Indeed, his

winged shaft had missed me so narrowly that I could hardly yet be

certain that I had passed quite unscathed. That little episode--tame

enough in all conscience--had occurred two years ago, when a Mr.

Davenant had come from Oxford with a small party of

fellow-undergraduates, to spend a more or less studious vacation in

our neighbourhood. I had met him, in all, three times on the footing

of a casual acquaintance, and we had talked “high philosophy” with the

eager interest of the very young. That was all. He had been a bird of

passage, alighting for a moment on the very outskirts of my life, only

to soar away into the unknown and vanish for ever.

It seemed an insignificant affair. A score of other men had come and

gone in the same way. But there was a difference--to me. Those other

men, too, had talked “high philosophy,” but I had forgotten utterly

what it was that they had said. Not so had it been in the case of Mr.

Davenant. Again and again had I found myself thinking over his talks

with me, not, I suspect, for the sake of the matter--which, to speak

the truth, was neither weighty nor brilliantly original--but rather

because I had enjoyed talking to him. And sometimes I had been

surprised to notice how clearly I remembered those talks, even to the

very words that he had used and the tones of his pleasant, manly

voice. Two years had passed since then--a long time in a girl’s life;

but still Mr. Davenant--his name, by the way, was Jasper, a

pleasant-sounding name I had thought it--remained the one figure that

had separated itself from the nebulous mass of humanity that had

peopled my short existence. And to-night--on this night of misery and

despair, when all that was worth living for seemed to be passing away,

as I lay staring up into the darkness, the memory of him came back to

me again. Once more I heard his voice--how strangely familiar it

sounded!--framing those quaintly-abstruse sentences; I recalled the

look in his eyes--clear, hazel eyes, they were, that sparkled with

vivacity and the fresh interest of youth--and his smile, as he uttered

some mild joke--a queer, humorous smile that drew his mouth just a

little to one side and seemed to give an added piquancy to the jest by

its own trifling oddity. I remembered it all, clearly, vividly, with

the freshness of yesterday; the words of wisdom, the humorous turn of

speech, the earnest, almost eager tone, the easy manner, friendly yet

deferential--all came back to me as it had done a hundred times

before, though it was two years ago.

He had been but a stranger--a mere passing stranger who had come and

gone--who had sailed across the rim of my horizon and vanished. But

even in that swift passage some virtue had exhaled from him by which

it had been given to me to look beyond the present into a world

hitherto invisible to me. He was my one little romance; a very little

one, but all that I had; and, to me, he stood for all those things

that might have been and now could never be. And so it happened that,

on this night, when I seemed to be bidding farewell to my youth and

all its dimly-cherished hopes, the memory of him lingered in my

thoughts and was with me still when, at last, sleep--the sleep of

utter weariness and exhaustion--closed my eyelids and shut out for a

time the realities of that life on which I would have been well

content never to look again.