The Devil's Garden

But here again he was governed by what he had set before himself as his unfailing guide-post—the necessity to conceal any motive for an act of vengeance. What would people think if he refused the money? It was a question not easy to answer, and the guide-post seemed to point in two opposite directions. He was harassed by terrible doubt until he and Mavis went to see the solicitor at Old Manninglea. During the conversation over there he assured himself that the solicitor saw nothing odd in the legacy, and made no guess at there having been an intrigue between Mavis and the benefactor; and further he ascertained that this was only one of several similar legacies. All was clear then: the guide-post pointed one way now: they must take the money.

But this necessity shook Dale badly again. It seemed as if the man so tightly put away in his lead coffin and stone vault was not done with yet. It was as if one could never be free from his influence, as if, dead or alive, he exercised power over one. Dale resisted such superstitious fancies in vain. They upset him; and the fear returned, bigger than before.

Dale had no real fear of death—nor even fear of the gallows. If the worst came, he could face death bravely. He was quite sure of that. Then, as he told himself thousands of times, it was absurd to be so shaken by terror. Terror of what? And he thought, "It is because of the uncertainty. But there too, how absurdly fullish I am; for there is no real uncertainty. My crime can not and will not be discovered. If I were to go now and accuse myself, people would not credit me."

He thought also, in intervals between the paroxysms, "I suppose what I've been feeling is what all murderers feel. It is this that makes men go and give themselves up to the police after they have got off scot free. They are safe, but they never can believe they're safe; they can't stand the strain, and if they didn't stop it, they'd go mad. So they give themselves up—just go get a bit o' quiet. And that is what I shall do, if this goes on much longer. I'd sooner be turned off short and sharp with a broken neck than die of exhaustion in a padded cell."

Then suddenly chance gave the hateful money an immense value, converted it into a means of escape from the outer life whose monotony and narrowness were assisting the cruelly wide inner life to drive him mad.

So he toiled comfortably, almost happily. Mavis was perfectly happy, and he found increasing solace in the knowledge of this fact.

Thence onward his busy days were free from fear, except for the transient panics which, as he surmised, he would be subject to for the remainder of his life. They did not matter, because he could control them to the extent of preventing the slightest outward manifestation. All at once while transacting business he would feel the inward collapse, deadly cold, a sensation that his intestines had been changed from close-knitted substance to water; and he would think "This person"—a farmer, a servant, old Mr. Bates, anybody—"suspects my secret. He guessed it a long while ago. Or he has just discovered the proofs of guilt." Nevertheless he went on talking in exactly the same tone of voice, without a contraction of a single facial muscle, with nothing at all shown unless perhaps a bead of perspiration on his forehead.

"Good morning, sir. Many thanks, sir.... Yes, Mr. Envill, the stuff shall be at your stables by one P.M. sharp. I'm making it my pride to obey all orders punctually, whether big or small."

Thus he got on comfortably enough during the daylight waking hours. But the fear that had gone out of the days had made its home in the night. Sleep was now its stronghold.

They began by his being happy and light-hearted, that is, he was innocent; and then gradually the horrible fact returned to his memory. Recently, or a long time ago, he had killed a man. That was always the end of the dream; his lightness and gaiety of spirits vanished, and he felt again the load that he was eternally forced to carry on his conscience.

The details of one form in which the dream worked itself out were repeated hundreds of times. There was a strange man who at first made himself extremely agreeable, and yet in spite of all his amiability Dale did not like him. Nevertheless there was some mysterious necessity to keep friends with him, even to kow-tow to him. And Dale gradually felt sure that he and this man had met before, and that the man knew it, but for some sinister purpose concealed his knowledge. They went about together in gay and lively scenes, and the man grew more and more hateful to Dale—becoming insolent, making disparaging remarks, sneering openly; and laughing when Dale only tittered in a nervous way and swallowed all insults. And Dale could not do otherwise, because he was afraid of the man.

And finally this false friend disclosed his true hostile character in some strikingly painful manner.

Then he uttered a terrified cry—because he saw it was Barradine, dead, battered, with glassy staring eyes. All the people rushed away screaming, the lights went out, the music ceased: Dale was alone, at dusk, in a rocky wilderness, still dragging the dead man by the heels.

And then he would wake—to find Mavis bending over him, to hear her saying, "My dearest, you are sleeping on your back, and it is making you dream." He clung to her desperately, muttering, "Quite right, Mav. Don't let me dream. It's a fullish trick—dreaming."

Already, although he did not recognize it, had come remorse for the wickedness of his deed. He had no regret for the fact itself, and not the slightest pity for the victim. Mr. Barradine had got no more than he deserved, the only proper adequate punishment for his offenses; but Dale knew that, according to the tenets of all religions, God does not allow private individuals to mete out punishment, however well deserved—especially not the death penalty.

He resolutely revived his idea of the dead man as a thing unfit to live—just a brute, without a man's healthy instincts—a foul debauchee, ruining sweet and comely innocence whenever he could get at it. Such a wretch would be executed by any sensible community. In new countries they would lynch him as soon as they caught him—"A lot of chaps like myself would ride off their farms, heft him up on the nearest tree, and empty their revolvers into him. And it wouldn't be a murder: it would be a rough and ready execution. Well, I did the job by myself, without sharing the responsibility with my pals; and I consider myself an executioner, not a murderer."

And he used to think: "I have justified myself to myself all along. I was never one who considered human life so sacred as some try to make out. Why should it be? Aren't we proved to be animals—along with the rest? The parsons own it nowadays themselves, allowing a man's soul to be what God counts most important, but not going so far as to say any animal's soul isn't immortal too. Then where's the sacredness? If it's right to kill a vicious dog or a poisonous snake, how is it so wrong to out a man that won't behave himself?"

Insensibly this consideration had the greatest possible effect on his conduct. Without advancing step by step in a reasoned progress, he understood that any one holding his views on human life generally should not attach an excessive value to his own individual life. He must carry his life lightly, and be ready to lay it down without a lot of fuss. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. He acted on the maxim, risking his life freely, courting dangers that he would have avoided in the days before the day on which he executed Mr. Barradine.

And Dale sometimes thought: "But there isn't any God. All that is my eye and my elbow. I believed it once, but I shall never believe it again."

His thoughts about God's laws were curious, and baffling to himself. They had been always there, always active, but in a manner secondary and faint when compared with his thoughts about his infringement of men's laws. Faith in God had seemed to be quite gone. It used to permeate his entire mind; and yet it dropped out as though it had been only in one corner of his mind, and a hole had been made under that corner for it to fall through. Now he sometimes had the notion that it went out through many holes, as if it had been forcibly ejected, and that his whole mind was left in a shattered and unstable condition.

Then it began to seem that the faith had not truly been altogether got rid of. Fragments of it remained.

Rapidly then he reached the certainty that he wished to have the faith back again. His was an orderly solid mind that could not do with cracks and holes in it, trimness, neatness, and firmness of outer wall were necessary to its well-being; openness to windy doubts ruined it. He felt that an accidental universe was the wrong box for it. He wanted to believe in the God who created order out of chaos, the God who settled cut-and-dried plans for the whole of creation—yes, the God made in man's image, and yet the Maker and Ruler of man.

He did so, acting as if God were believed in as truly by him as by the most stanch believers. He clung to the idea. It seemed to be the way out of all his troubles. He would make peace with God—then there would be no need to bother about men, or offer any confession of his guilt to them.

He grew calmer now. Doing things had always suited him better than brooding over things. His new determination illuminated the reason for reckless adventures, and lifted their purpose to a higher plane. He thought now that he held his life at God's will—to be given back to God at a moment's notice.

This thought made him calmer still, made him strong, almost made him happy. A life for a life. He would expiate his offense in God's good time. So no danger was too big for William Dale to face; his courage became a byword; gentlefolk and peasants alike admired and wondered.

Out of the consistent course of action came the consistency of the thought that was governing the action. Assumption of the reality of God as a working hypothesis led to conviction of the existence of God.

That evening when for the first time he went to the Baptist Chapel, the illusion was strong upon him that every man, woman, and child in the congregation had discovered his secret. When they all stood up to sing, it seemed that he was naked, defenseless, utterly at their mercy. With every word of their carefully selected hymn they were telling him that they knew all about him. When they began their third verse, they simply roared a denunciation straight at him:

And the second and third hymns were just as bad, shaking him to pieces, tumbling him headlong into the terror he had felt when his crime was no more than a week old. The rest of the service entranced and delighted him, made him think: "These people are in touch with God, and their God is full of love and mercy. If He would accept me, I should feel safe." At the end of the service he knelt, praying for this to happen. Then he went home and doubted.

And once more he prayed to the God of the Baptists; and then once more doubted.

While he was walking home, he thought: "It is too good to be true. Perhaps I'm fullish to pin my trust to it. Do I believe in it all, or do I not?" He wanted a sign; and when the storm of thunder and lightning burst like the most tremendous sign one could ask for, he seized this opportunity of risking his life, and said: "Now I stand here for God to take me or leave me."

He was left, not taken. The fear vanished, the doubt passed, and he made his way into the Baptist Church exactly as if, as Mr. Osborn had said, there was an irresistible pressure behind him, and he could not make his way anywhere else.

Then came the years of tranquillity, the respite from pain, his golden time. He was prosperous, respected; he had a loved and loving wife, and lovely lovable children; he had grain in his barns, money in his bank, peace in his mind. He felt too all the better part in him growing bigger and bigger; religion, in simplifying his ideas, had increased their value; his intellectual power seemed wider and more comprehensive when exercised with regard to all things that can be learned, now that he had entirely ceased to exercise it with regard to things that must not be questioned.

And then there had happened something that was like the knocking down of a house of cards, the blowing out of a paper lantern, or the obliteration of a picture scratched on sand when the inrushing tide sweeps over it.

Dale's meditations had carried him backward and forward through the past years, and left him against the blank wall of the present.

He was sitting on the fallen beech tree in the woodland glade. The sun had set, and the night promised to be darker than recent nights; when he looked at the grand gold watch given to him by his admirers, he could only just see its hands. Nearly nine o'clock. He had been here a long while. It was hours and hours since Norah went away. He sighed wearily, got up, and walked back to his empty home.

Quite empty—that was the impression it made upon his mind both to-night and all next day. He looked at it in the bright morning sunshine, across the meadows, while the scythes laid down the first long swathes of fragrant grass, and it seemed merely the shell of a house. He looked at it in the midday glare, as he came up the field to his dinner, and it seemed cold and black and cheerless. He looked at it in the softer, kinder light of late afternoon, and it seemed to him tragically sad—a monument of woe rather than a house, a fantastic tomb built in the shape of a house in order to symbolize the homely joy that had perished on this spot.

No one knew it, of course. To other people he appeared to be just the same as usual, naturally preoccupied with thoughts about the weather as one always is at grass-cutting time, giving his orders firmly, and seeing that they were obeyed promptly, smiling and nodding when you showed yourself handy, frowning and looking rather black if you did anything "okkard or feckless." Who could have guessed, as he looked at his watch and then at the sky, that he was thinking: "It wants five minutes of noon, and she is prob'ly out on what they term an esplanade. There is a nice breeze down there, comin' to her over the waater, blowin' her hair a bit loose, flappin' her skirts, sendin' out her neck ribbon like a little flag behind her. It's all jolly, wi' the mil'tary band, an' the smell o' the waves, an' crowds an' crowds o' people—an' she won't have occasion to think o' me. P'raps they've bid her wear her best—the white frock Mavis gave her, with the stockings to match, and the new buckle-shoes—and likely young lads'll eye her all over as they pass. Yes, she's seeing now the young uns—the mates for her age—the proper article to make a photograph of a suitable pair; and she'll soon stop thinking anything about me, if she hasn't done it a'ready."

"Good evening, sir. Only three to-night."

"Thank you. Good night, George," and Dale had a friendly smile for this old acquaintance.

Postman George was growing fat and heavy, betraying signs of age. He had been a sprightly telegraph boy when Dale was postmaster of Rodchurch.

"Good night, sir. Fine weather for the hay."

"Yes, capital."

When the postman had gone Dale stood trembling. One of the letters was from her. He felt unnerved by the mere sight of her handwriting on the envelope—the hand that was so like his own, the hand that she had taught herself by laborious study and imitation of his official copper-plate; and he thought, "If I was wise I shouldn't open it. If I was strong enough, I should just burn it, without reading. For, whatever's inside, it's going to make me one bit more desp'rate than I am now."

He read on; and his pleasure was so exquisite and his pain so laceratingly sharp that the sky and the acids swam round and round.

She was thinking only of him; she wanted no one younger and handsomer; in her eyes and thoughts he was not old: he was her boy. Those words had a terrible effect upon him. They entered his blood as if they had been an injection of some sweetly narcotic drug; thy lanced deep into his bowels as if they had been a surgeon's knife; they made him like a half-anesthetized patient who at the same time dreams of paradise and feels that he is bleeding to death.

"You are my boy ... and I am your loving girl."

He moved from the gate, hurried along the dusty road, and entered Hadleigh Wood at the first footpath. As he got over the stile he was saying to himself, "This letter finishes me. I can't go on with it after this. I'm done for."

She wanted him; she longed for him; he was her boy.

He could get to her to-night. She was only twenty or twenty-two miles away, as the crow flies—say half an hour's journey if one had the wings of a heron. He could rush home, jump into his gig, and send the horse at a gallop; he could get there by road or rail, somehow; he could telegraph, telling her not to go to bed, telling her to go to the station and wait for him there.

Then he would walk with her in the moonlight by the sea, on the wet sand, close to the breaking waves. When they came back to the Institution no light would be showing from any of the windows, and she might say, "I'm shut out. When they come down to let me in, won't they make a fuss?" But he would say, "You are not going in there again." "What," she would say, "are you taking me back to Vine-Pits after only two days? Don't you think Mrs. Dale will be angry?"

Then he would say, "I'm not taking you back. I'm going to take you half across the world with me. I've tried hard, Norah, but I can't do without you. I own up, I'm beat, I take the consequences. I'm not good, I'm bad. I've done wicked things, and now I'm ripe for the crowning wickedness. I'm going to break my wife's heart, dishonor my children's name, and take you down to hell with me."

He was crying now as a child cries, abandoning himself to his tears, not troubling to wipe them away, temporarily overcome by self-pity. But soon he shook off this particular form of weakness, and thought, "What nonsense comes into a man's head, when he's once off his right balance—such wild nonsense, such mad nonsense. Drown her, poor innocent. Make her pay my bill. Think of it even—when I'd swim the Atlantic to save her life, if it was in danger."

And then the thought that had been the impetus or origin of these fantastic imaginations presented itself again, and more strongly than before. He said to himself, "This letter is my death-warrant. I can't go on. It is my death-warrant."

He had made straight for the main ride, and he walked straight along it in the direction of Kibworth Rocks. As he drew toward them it was as if the spirit of the dead man called him, seeming to say: "Come and keep me company. Our old quarrel is over. You and I understand each other now. We are two of a kind, just as like as two hogs from one litter—you the sanctimonious psalm-singer and I the conscienceless profligate—we are brothers at last in our beastliness."

Dale shrugged his shoulders, held his head high, and grunted fiercely. But when he was abreast of the rocks, this imagined voice seemed to speak to him again.

"You and I have drawn so near together that there's only one difference now—that you are alive and I am dead. But even that difference will be gone soon."

And Dale, walking on rather slower than before, made an odd gesture of his left hand, a wave of hand and arm together, as of a dignified well-to-do citizen waving off some impudent mendicant: seeming to say, "Be damned to you. Just you lie quiet where I put you, and don't worry. I decline to have anything to do with you, or to allow the slightest communication between us. I simply don't recognize you—nor will I ever admit again that I see the faintest resemblance. If I wished, I could explain why. Only I shan't condescend to do so—certainly not to you."

Dale looked at the top of the belfry tower and the roof of the central block, and thought of it as a temple of youth, a sacred place dedicated to the worship of tender and innocent life. He moved through the trees and found a point where, on higher ground, he could look across into the garden and see a part of the terrace and verandas. None of the girls was visible. They had been gathered into those hospitable walls for the night.

Presently he thought he heard them singing. Yes, that was an evening hymn. The girls were thanking God for the long daylight of a summer's day, before they lay down to rest, to sleep, to forget they were alive till God's sun rose again.

And Dale began once more to think of God. To-night he would not fly from the sound of the girls' voices. All that reluctance and distaste was over and done with; it belonged to the time when he was still struggling against the inevitable drift of his inclinations. Now he had passed to a state of mind that nothing external could really affect.

"The finger of God"—Yes, those were unforgivable words. He stretched himself at full length upon the ground, leaned his head on his elbow, and lay musing.

And it seemed to him that, look where one pleased, one could see the real work of the finger of God. It had been giving him, William Dale, faint imperceptible pushes for fifteen years, and see now at the end where it had pushed him. First it had pushed him upward, higher and higher, to a position of conspicuous pride, to the topmost summit of a fair mountain, where he could look round and say, "I have all that I pined for. This is the world's castle, and I am the king of the castle." Then it had begun to push him down the other side of this mountain, the dark side, the side that was always in shadow, downward and still downward to the miasmic unhealthy plain where all was rankness, downward to the level of corruption and death. Yes, it had brought him, the bold, proud law-maker, down and down till he stood no higher than the victim of his law.

If he had been promptly convicted and hanged, it would have been no punishment at all compared with what was happening now. The long delay was the essential part of the punishment, and of the lesson. The fact that no one suspected his crime had given him the period of agonized suspense, with all those dream-torments, the fear of death which was worse than death itself.

He thought of all the things that had appeared to be blind chances but were really stern decrees. The true function of the money that came from the dead man's hand was to keep him always on the rack of memory. And with the aid of the money he had been made to move a little nearer to the site of his crime. He had been made to buy Bates' business so that he might dwell right up against Hadleigh Wood, see it every day from his windows, hear it whispering to him every night when he was not asleep and dreaming of it. But for that apparently lucky chance of Mr. Bates' retirement, he would have gone to some splendid new country, and severing ties of locality, would have shattered associations of ideas, and been able to forget. He had made up his mind to go to one of the Australian colonies and make a fresh start there. But that didn't match with God's intentions by any manner of means.

The selected instrument—Yes, she was the one girl on earth who could have been safely employed to achieve God's double purpose of overwhelming him with base passion and bringing his lesson home to him simultaneously. No other girl that ever was born could have aroused such desire in him, and yet have slipped unscathed out of his arms at the very moment when the consummation of his sin seemed unavoidable. Any other girl must herself have been sacrificed in destroying him; only the child who had frightened him in the wood could instantaneously, by a few unconsidered words, have taken all the fire out of him and changed his heart to a lump of ice. That was a stroke of the Master: most Godlike in its care for the innocent and its confusion of the guilty.

She had come into his life again, into his very home, and he had never once asked himself: "Is Norah she?" No, because God would not allow him to do so; it had suited God's purpose to paralyze the outlet of all natural thought in that direction. So she grew tall and strong under his eyes—the dreaded imp of the wood eating his food, squatting at his own fireside; changing into the imagined nymph of the wood that he had seen only in dreams; becoming the very spirit of the wood—yes, the wood's avenging spirit.

He moved from his recumbent position, sat up, and drew out Norah's letter from the breast pocket of his jacket. He read her letter again, and his sadness and despair deepened. There was no revolt now; he felt nothing but black misery. He thought: "I used to fear that she would be the means of my death, and now death is coming from her. This letter is my death-warrant."

There was no other way out of his troubles. Life had become unendurable; he could not go on with it. And this thought became now a fixed determination. He must copy the example of other and better men; he must do for himself, as old Bates and many others had done for themselves when they found their lives too hard for them.

Suppose he were to carry her off to the Colonies, and attempt to begin the new life that he had planned fifteen years ago. Impossible—he was too old; nearly all his strength had gone from him; the mere idea of fighting his way uphill again filled him with a sick fatigue. And the girl, when she saw him failing, physically and mentally, would desert him. Her love could not last—it was too unnatural; and when, contrasting him with other men, she saw that he was feeble, exhausted, utterly worn out, she would shake off the bondage of his companionship. No, there was no possible hope for the future of such a union.

And again he felt self-pity, but of another kind than that which had stirred him an hour ago. Now it was clear-sighted, analytical, almost free from weakness. He thought: "It is a bit rough—it is rather hard, rather cruel on me, all said and done. For I know that I might have bin a good man. The good lay in me—it only wanted drawing out." He remembered the elevating effect of his love for Mavis, how through all the time of his belief in her purity he had tried to purify himself, to purge away all the grossness and sensualness that, as he vainly fancied, made him unworthy to be the mate of so immaculate a creature; but he was not allowed to continue the purifying process; her horrible revelation ended it—knocked the sense out of it, made it preposterously absurd. "If Mavis had been in the beginning what she has come to be at last, she would have kept me on the highroad to Heaven." But all the chances had gone against him. "My father failed me, my mother failed me, my wife failed me."

His pity for himself became more poignant; yet still there was nothing weakening in it, at least nothing that tended to alter his determination. "No," he thought, "take me all round, I couldn't originally have bin meant to turn out a wrong un. I've never bin mean or sneaking or envious in my dealings with other people. I've never spared myself to give a helping hand to those who treated me decently. And no one will ever guess the kindly sentiments I entertained for many other men, or the pleasure I derived the few times I could feel: 'This chap is one I respect, and he seems to like me.' I wanted to be liked, but the gift o' making myself liked was denied me. Yet, except for being cast down into sin, I should have got over that difficulty. I was on the right road there too. By enlarging my mind I'd become more sympathetic. Though always a shy man really and truly, I was learning to smother the false effects of my shyness."

Thinking thus of his mind, and his long-continued efforts to improve its powers, he felt: "To go and extinguish all this is an awful thing to have to do."

Yes, darkness without a glimmer of hope.

"Mavis," he said, after supper that evening "I've noticed a branch at the top of the walnut tree that doesn't look to me too safe. I must lop that tree first chance I get—or we shall have an accident."

Next morning he was up and dressed before the sun rose, and he came down-stairs very softly, carrying his boots in his hands, and pausing now and then to listen. The house was quite silent, with no one stirring yet except himself. He sat on the lowest step of the stairs and put on his boots, listened again, then quietly let himself out of the front door.

On the threshold the cool morning air rushed into his lungs, expanding them widely, making him draw deep breaths merely for the pleasure of tasting its freshness and sweetness. The light was still gray and dim, and the buildings round the yard were vague and shadowy. In the garden there was a delicious perfume of roses—those most beautiful of all flowers pouring out their fragrant charms, although their glory of color had not yet burst forth from the shadows of night.

In the loft where the tools were kept he remained much longer than he had intended. At first there was scarcely any light at all up here, and, having stupidly forgotten to bring a box of matches, he had to grope about fumblingly; but gradually the light improved. He found a saw, and, attaching it to a light cord, slung it round his neck in the approved woodman fashion. The saw would be carried merely for the sake of appearances. Then he hunted for the particular rope that he required for his purposes, and could not find it. He had seen it two days ago, neatly rolled, in the corner with other tackle; but now the corner was all untidy, a confused mass of cordage, and the good new strong rope was concealing itself beneath weak old rubbish. He knew that he could trust this rope, because it was the exact fellow of the one on the pulleys—and with the pulley rope they let down loads that were a good deal heavier than any man.

Then all at once a ray of light shot through a chink in the boarded wall, and came like a straight rainbow across the dusty gray floor and into the corner where he stood stooping. His rope was there right enough, showing itself conspicuously, seeming to rise on its coils like a snake and slip its sinuous neck into his hands, so that he had picked it up and taken it from the corner before he knew what he was doing.

Then he thought: "I am wasting time." He was conscious of an imperative necessity for speed and a great danger in acting too hurriedly; and a queer idea came to him that while in this loft he had been having a series of cataleptic fits—sudden blanknesses, total arrests of volition if not of consciousness, during which he had stood still, listening or staring, but not doing anything to the rope.

He came down from the loft, and in the doorway below a flood of bright sunlight dazzled him. The sun had risen, Some of Mavis' pigeons were cooing gently on the granary roof, a horse in the stables began to whinny, and two of the men came whistling round the outer barn into the yard.

"Good mornin', sir."

"Good morning."

"Another nice day we are goin' to 'aarve, sir."

"Yes, looks like it."

Then the men went into the stables, and Dale passed through the kitchen garden to the back of the house. Beneath the walnut tree he slung the coiled rope over one shoulder and under the other arm; and then he slowly ascended the ladder, saying to himself: "I am on the steps of my scaffold. The scaffold steps. I am going up the scaffold steps." From the top of the ladder he got upon a branch, and, putting his arms about the stem, began to climb. "Yes," he said to himself, "my gallows tree. I am going up the gallows tree. This is my gallows tree;" and he climbed nimbly and firmly.

The green leaves were all round him, a green tent with pretty loopholes through which he could take peeps at the home that was on the point of vanishing forever from his eyes. He paused on a level with the broad eaves, and looked through between branches at a window on the first floor landing. The casements stood wide open; the square of glass glittered; the muslin curtains just stirred, trembled whitely. Far down below his feet were the flagged pathway, the wooden bench, and three shining milk-pans.

Soon he had climbed so high that he knew it would not be safe to climb higher. He must stop here. At this point the main stem was still thick enough to take the shock that in a minute he would give it. Above this point it might not stand the strain. Besides, this was high enough for appearances. He was within reach of the branch that had some decayed wood at the top of it. Sitting astride a branch close to the stem, he adjusted and fixed his rope, binding it round and round the stem and over and under the branch, reefing it, making it taut and trim so that no strain could loosen it; and all the while he was conscious of the power in his arms and hands, the volume of air in his lungs, the flow of blood in his veins, the nervous force bracing and hardening his muscles. The rope was fast now. Now he assured himself that its free length—the part from the tree to the noose—was absolutely correct as to its amount. Nothing remained to do, nothing but to stand upon the branch, fix the noose round his neck, and step off into the air.

In this final position his head had emerged into a leafless space, so that he could see in all directions; could look down at the house, at that open window, the kitchen door, and the flagged path; could look at the barn roofs, the rick-yard, the beehives; could look at his fields, where the grass lay drying; or could look away at woodland, at heath, at distant hill. He paused purposely to give himself one last look round at all he was leaving.

Yes, here was the world—the bitterly sweet world, smiling once more as it wakes from sleep. Looking down at it he felt an agony of regret. How intolerably cruel his doom. Why should he of all mortals have been made to suffer so? But God's law—his own law. Mentally he was obeying, but physically he was in fierce revolt. Every fiber of him, every drop of blood, every minute nerve-cell was crying out against the execution.

But he would have done it if he had not heard his daughter's voice.

Rachel had come to the open window, and she uttered a frightened cry at sight of him perched high in the tree.

"Oh, dads, do take care!"

Next moment her mother came to the window; and they stood side by side, each with a hand to her eyes, watching him in the same attitude of anxiety.

"Don't speak to him," whispered Mavis; and Dale heard the whisper as clearly as if it had been close against his ear.

He could not do it before them. He had been too slow about it; he could not darken their lives with the visible horror of it. And it seemed to him that he had not sufficiently thought of its effect upon them. The whole thing had been clumsily planned. Just at first, when he was found hanging dead with the saw dangling from his neck, it might have been believed that he had slipped and fallen, and hanged himself by accident; but afterward all would have known that it was suicide. The truth would have been betrayed by the running noose, by recollections of Mr. Bates, and by everybody's knowledge of an ancient local custom.

"Mind how you come down," said Mavis. "Do come down carefully."

"Yes, dads," said Rachel, "do please come down carefully."

He climbed down slowly, feeling no joy in his respite, saying to himself: "I must think of some other way. I must finish with the hay-making, get the rick complete, and clear up everything in the office—so's at least poor Mav'll find things all ship-shape when she has to take over and manage without me. My hurry to get it through was selfishness; for, after all, I've best part of three weeks to do it in. The on'y real necessity is to have it done before Norah comes home."

And again he thought of the finger of God. This clumsy hurried execution had been refused by God. He was being pushed away, so that the last glimpse of his eyes should not see the pleasant picture of home.

Two or three days passed. The busy yet peaceful life of home and fields was going on; the hay had been carried; the rick was made, and the rick-sheet covered a handsome pile.

Dale worked hard, quite in his old untiring way, and seemed just his natural self; but truly he was mentally detached from the surrounding scene. For the second time in his life, and to a greater extent than the first time, he was subjugated and controlled by one dominant idea. Throughout each day all things around him were dreamlike and unsubstantial, and he performed many actions as automatically as if he had been a somnambulist. He walked and talked or rode on the shaft of a wagon without in the least troubling to think what he was doing, and every time his thought became active it seemed to spring into vigor again merely to obey the prompting of the inner voice that now governed him.

Thus while sitting on the wagon shaft he thought: "If I pitched myself off and let the wheels go over me, that would be likely, just the accident that fools are always making, but it wouldn't fulfil the other conditions that have been laid on me. Also it might fail. I might only mess myself up, and not quite kill myself."

A gun and a hedge—no accident can be more common than that. Say you want to shoot some rats that have been showing their ugly whiskers in the field ditches; take your gun, well charged, and blow your brains out among the brambles of an untrimmed hedge.

Or these motor-cars! He thought of the way they came racing down the highroad from Old Manninglea. How would it be to wait for one of these buzzing, crashing, stinking road monsters over there on the edge of the heath, and jump out just in front of it? If one stooped down and took the full shock on one's forehead, it would mean a mess that there would be no patching together again. But one could not attempt that in daylight, because the driver would jam the breaks on, swerve round one, do anything desperate rather than run into one. And if he could not avoid one, he would tell everybody at the inquest that it was a plain suicide and nothing else. There would be passengers in the car too, who would also swear to its being a suicide. And at night these traveling cars have such powerful head-lamps that the roadway is lighted up for a hundred yards in front of them. Even at night, they would recognize it as suicide.

Toward dusk every evening external things became more real, and his hold on life tightening, he suffered more acutely in each hour that passed. Night after night he went back to Hadleigh Wood. It was the wood of despair, the focal point of all his pain, and he was drawn to it irresistibly through the gathering darkness.

"No, Mav, of course not."

"Are you sure, Will? Do tell me if you've something worrying you."

"What should I have to worry me?" and he put his arm round her ample waist, and gave her an affectionate squeeze.

"The hay's all right, isn't it?"

"Yes, everything is all right.... You can't do better than you've suggested about Billy. Take him with you to Manninglea—and, look here, if Mr. Jones can't fit him properly out of stock, let him make the suit to measure. Don't consider the extra expense. We can afford it."

"Thank you, Will." Mavis was delighted. "You've told me to do the very thing I wanted to do; but of course I'd never have done it without your authority. I've been longing to see the little chap in clothes regularly cut out and finished for him, and nobody else."

Going through the yard Dale was stopped by his men. The foreman wanted directions for to-morrow's work; the carter asked for three new tires; the stableman regretted to be compelled to report that one of the horses had broken his manger rack.

Mavis, however, would wish to remember him, and be sorry when she found his image fading. She would struggle to keep it bright and fresh. She would grieve long and sincerely—and then she would be quite happy. She wouldn't marry again; she wouldn't do anything foolish. "No," he thought, "she'll just devote herself to the bairns, working for them late and early, and managing the business as well as I have managed it myself. She'll be cheated a bit here and there, as a woman always is—but, all said and done, she'll do very well without me. Customers will support her—the word will go round. 'Don't let's turn our backs on the widow of that poor fellow Dale.'"

As soon as he got into the wood he hurried as rapidly as he could toward Kibworth Rocks; and then when he got near them he walked slowly up and down the ride, with his head bowed and his hands clasped behind his back. And each evening the same thing happened. Visions of Norah assailed him; he passed again through the tortures of yearning desire that he had felt when he first read her letter; and he said to himself, "If proof was wanted, here's the proof. This would show me, if I didn't know already, that I must do it."

And, groaning, he spoke to this mental picture that he had evoked for his renewed torment. "Norah, my sweet one, I can't help myself. Commands have been laid upon me. I'm no longer free to do what I please. Norah, don't look away from me. Turn to your boy—let him see your dear eyes, though the sight of them makes him bleed." And the thought-picture obeyed him. He saw the entrancing oval of the face instead of its delicate profile, looked into the profound beauty of her eyes, felt that her warm red lips were close in front of him, and that he would go raving mad if they did not come closer still and let him kiss them.

After such spasms of burning pain he was temporarily exhausted; he felt completely emptied of emotional power, as if his nerves had delivered so fierce a discharge that they must cease from working until time and repose had allowed them to replenish themselves. Then, so long as this state lasted, his love for the girl was deprived of all material for passion; it was as though the highest thinking part of him had been cut off from the sensational mass, and only the top of his head served to keep alive his memory of the girl.

But soon those treacherous nerves restored themselves, the upper and lower parts of him were all one again, and the diffuse yet darting pain returned. Anger came too. It seemed that the dead man mocked him, went on softly laughing at him.

"What a humbug you are"—he gave the dead man words—"what a colossal humbug. You and your nice Sunday go-to-meeting thoughts. It's so easy, isn't it? to dress up one's rottenness in pretty sentimental twaddle. But you don't deceive anybody. You don't even deceive yourself, not for three minutes at a stretch. You know that underneath all your humbugging pretenses the black sin is unchanged. You are no better and no worse than I was. You are exactly the same as me."

And Dale, breaking his own rule, or forgetting in his anger that he had refused to discuss things with this imaginary voice, answered wrathfully.

"This girl cares for me—that's the difference between us. She offers me love. And that's something you never had."

Dale brandished his arms wildly, turned round, and stared at the pine-trees and the bracken. It seemed to him that some imperishable essence of the man was really here, mingling with the shadows, floating in the dusky air; and that possibly over there among the rocks, if one went to look for it, one might see a simulacrum of the man's bodily shape—perhaps only a gray shadowy outlined form, the odious stranger of dreams, but more vague than in the dreams, stretched on his back, holding up his blood-stained boots, and grinning all over his battered face.

"Yes, perhaps so," said the voice. "But I notice that you don't come in to look for me. You keep to the ride still. Now you've got so very close to me, why do you turn shy of the last little bit? Is it that you wish me to save you trouble by showing myself?"

And Dale made gestures of semi-insane fury, and spoke in a loud, hoarse voice.

"Yes, show yourself if you want to. You 'aarve my leave. Come out an' stan' here before me. I'm not afraid of you—now or hereafter."

"Hereafter—hereafter—hereafter." As Dale moved away slowly, the dead man seemed to mock him, to laugh at him derisively. "Hereafter—yes, that's a big word. Yes, go and talk that out with God."