In the Balance

by Patricia Wentworth - Miss Silver 04 - In the Balance

  He came down to dinner, and she wasn’t Lisle any longer—she was a stranger. She did not look at him. He felt her shrink when he approached her. All that he had ever had of her had been with-drawn, silently, irrevocably, without reason and without relenting.

  “A god, a god our severance ruled,

  And bade between our shores to be

  The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.”

  The lines went through his head. They were most bitterly true. He accepted the severance, as he had always accepted it, but that it should become absolute at this of all moments was the final bitterness. Days of suspicion darkening to a despairing certainty—moments, hours, when these suspicions seemed a foul miasma from his own corroding jealousy of Dale ...There was a voice which talked with him in most unsparing accents— “You love Dale’s wife, and so—Dale is a murderer. You are eating your own heart, and because of that—Dale is a murderer. Lisle is the sun and the moon and the stars, and because they are out of your reach—Dale is a murderer.”

  Against this a slow damning computation of pros and cons. Lydia. Lisle— drowning—all but drowned. A smashed car. A dead girl lying among rocks—a girl who was wearing Lisle’s coat. That poor devil Pell at the inquest. His face. Lisle’s coat. Lisle—Dale looking at her, putting his arm about her, smiling down at her as if she were the sun and the moon and the stars for him too. Dale—who had been the chief thing in his life—until Lisle came—

  This severance—between himself and Dale—between himself and Lisle—

  “The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea—”

  He saw Lisle go by, bare-headed in the evening light. At the moment he could only think that he must let her go. If he went after her now, his own barriers would not hold.

  He let her go, and turning, walked rapidly away in the opposite direction.

  It was perhaps half an hour later that he remembered Lisle’s change of dress. She had worn black lace at dinner, but when she passed him, going down towards the sea wall, she had on a light washing frock and beach shoes. Beach shoes. Then she was not just going to sit on the wall as she often did in the cool of the evening—she wouldn’t have changed just for that. She must have been meaning to go down on to the beach. Why? In all the time he had known her, when had she ever gone off to the beach by herself in the dusk? The trouble in his mind had dulled its natural acute--ness. Suddenly the vague, conflicting fears and doubts, the passionate strivings and repressions which had made it their battle-ground, fused into certainty. If Lisle had gone beyond the sea wall, then she had not gone alone, and if she had not gone alone, then there was only one person with whom she would have gone, and that was Dale—Dale who had made a point of telling them all that he was off to the air-field.

  When Rafe’s mind had reached this point it took charge of his body and sent it racing to the house. Not far to go—he had been on his way there.

  He passed Alicia on the terrace.

  “Where’s Lisle?”

  She said, “Gone to bed.”

  It took him five minutes to make sure that she was not in her room, to slip into flannels and beach shoes, to snatch up a torch and be clear of the house again.

  When he came to the sea wall he stood there a moment, listening at first, and then calling her name.

  “Lisle—Lisle—Lisle!”

  No voice, no answer.

  He ran down the steps and switched on his torch. There was still a little light in the sky. Sea, strand, and sky were still separate, but like a second and more invisible tide the dusk flowed out from the land to meet the rising tide of the sea.

  He stood irresolute. There was nothing to tell him which way to go, but if the fear that had brought him here and was drenching him with its cold sweat sprang from something more than his own distorted fancy, then it was in the direction of the Shepstone Rocks that he must look for Lisle. The wildest, the most dangerous part of the coast, the least frequented—at this hour solitary as a murderer’s heart could wish. By no stretch of the imagination could he suppose that Lisle would turn that way alone. And if not alone, where had she been taken, and how would he find her?

  With these thoughts he was questing to and fro, turning the torch in every direction. Not many people ever came this way. Once the immediate neighbourhood of the steps was left behind, the sand was smooth and unmarked as the tide had left it. The water had not quite reached the wall. The dry sand at its foot would hold no print. But half a dozen yards along the torch found what he was looking for—Lisle’s footprints going towards the Rocks, and the larger, bolder prints which were Dale’s.

  He had followed them for perhaps half a dozen yards, when the torch picked up a second set of tracks—Dale’s footprints coming back—alone. They came in at a slant past the out-going tracks and were lost in the dry sand. It was plain enough and dreadful enough to read. Two had gone out, and only one had come back. Within a few short hours the damning evidence would be smoothed out by the tide, and the sand innocently blank and bare again. Fate had not given Dale those hours.

  Everything in Rafe went cold and still. There was nothing in all the world but to find Lisle, dead or alive, and it came to him that she must be dead, because Dale would not now have left her alive. He could think of this quite calmly, because at the moment when he saw that single returning track all his capacity for feeling died. He was not conscious of distress, and he was not at all conscious of his body. There remained only the capacity for thought —lucid, keen, undisturbed by any hampering emotion.

  He followed the footprints to the spit of sand which ran down towards the sea and the ridge beyond the Shepstone Rocks. Half way there he lost them under the first ripple of the tide. The torch went into his pocket and he went on, ankle-deep, knee-deep, breast-deep, and then wading and pushing against the weight of the water, up the side of the long, sprawling ridge. The water was no more than ankle-deep here. He walked along the ridge past the rocky point, and as he turned shoreward he heard Lisle’s cry.

  It was so faint a sound that at any other time it would have gone by with all the million sounds which are never heard, but at this moment when everything in him was strung to the utmost pitch of expectancy it reached him. His heart jerked against his side. He began to walk towards the sound, coming down off the ridge into the deeper water, and then feeling his way slowly and cautiously so as to avoid the rocks. When the water was at its deepest he heard the sound again. And then his feet were on shingle and he came up the shallow slope of the beach towards the cliff.

  As soon as he was clear of the water he called out.

  “Lisle—where are you?”

  The words beat on the rock wall and came back in a broken echo. And on that, something that wasn’t an echo. His name—“Rafe!”

  Lisle had gone on calling. There was something in her which wouldn’t give up, something which said, “If I drown, it shan’t be because I gave up.” Giving up didn’t just mean dying. It meant letting in the dark, and the loneliness, and Dale’s treachery. If she had to die, she wanted to keep those things out, right up to the end. As long as she went on calling it meant that she wasn’t letting them in. When she heard Rafe’s voice all her courage leapt. She looked up from where she stood and saw the flicker of his torch, high above her like the flash of summer lightning. Only it wasn’t lightning—it was light.

  She called again, and she said, “I’m here— here—here,” and went on saying it till the light shone over the edge of the pit and she could see him kneeling there, peering down. The beam of the torch shone suddenly upon her upturned face. White, drenched and drowned, she looked at Rafe. But her eyes were alive. He saw the pupils contract and the lids come down against the glare.

  45

  “LISLE! WHAT HAPPENED? Are you all right?”

  She said, “I fell—” and heard his voice with a savage note in it.

  “He pushed you!”

  Her hands were on the rocky wall, holding it as best she might She hid her face against them and felt how cold th
ey were.

  There was a moment, and then he called her sharply.

  “See if you can reach me! Stretch up as high as you can!”

  The beam of the torch was gone. She could just make out a dark something that was his head. He was lying down on the flat-topped boulder from which Dale had pushed her, reaching down to her at the full stretch of his arms as she reached up. She stood on tiptoe and strained towards him, but their hands did not touch. She heard him move, draw back. The light came again.

  “You can’t get higher up?”

  “No—I’m on the highest bit. The floor slopes down. There’s a deep hole. I’ve been afraid to move.”

  The beam of the torch went to and fro. It picked up a wide fissure splitting off the flat boulder from a rock wall which joined the main reef. He switched off the light and put the torch in his trouser pocket. Its light and the strength of the battery behind it were pretty well all that stood between them and death. They were not to be wasted. He said,

  “I can’t reach you. There’s a split in the rock—that’s why the water is so far down. The pool drains away as the tide goes out. There’s nothing to worry about —we’ll just have to wait till it comes in, that’s all.”

  “Until the tide comes in!” Her voice was a faint breath of horror. It seemed too dreadful to be borne. Wait till the tide came in and drowned them!

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you see that the water will float you up? Even if I could just reach your hands, I don’t think I could get you out of a sheer place like this. There’s nothing for me to hold on to, and this rock’s as slippery as they’re made. But we’ve only got to wait and the tide will do the trick. Look out—I’m letting my belt down to you. You keep hold of the buckle end. That’ll give you something to pull on, and as soon as the water’s high enough I’ll get you out.”

  “Will it be long?”

  “About twenty minutes, I think—perhaps half an hour. It comes up pretty quick once it’s got over the ridge. We’re really not much above that level here—that’s why I can’t risk going back, for help. Evans is the only man about the place who can swim, and he’s not much use, and by the time I’d got him and a rope—well, it’s not good enough. I’ll get you out all right. Have you got hold of the belt?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not hurt?”

  “No.”

  “Lisle—why did you go with him? Why were you so mad?”

  She said, “I didn’t know—”

  “Why didn’t you go away? I tried to make you go away.”

  “Was that why? I thought you hated me. Was it because you knew—about Dale?”

  “I didn’t know—I was horribly afraid?”

  Strange to be talking like this in the dark, the sky just visible, their faces hidden one from the other. Strange, and easy.

  She thought of that, and she thought that it had always been easy to talk to Rafe. She said,

  “He killed Lydia. Did you know that?”

  He used the same words again.

  “I didn’t know—I was afraid.”

  “And Cissie—poor Cissie.”

  “Lisle, I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t know. I could only suspect. There was always some way that it might have happened. Lydia might have slipped —she hadn’t any head for heights. Pell might have damaged your car, and Pell might have murdered Cissie—things happen like that. But when I found her lying there—”

  “You found her?”

  “I thought it was you.”

  “But Rafe—you found her?”

  “Yes, I found her—and I thought it was you. I took her by the shoulders to turn her over. That’s how my prints came on that damned coat. Lisle, I thought it was you—” His voice shuddered and broke.

  She said, “Did you see her fall?”

  “No, I just came on her. I didn’t hear anything either—the gulls were crying—I was a long way off. I had just been trying to get you to go away, and you asked me whether I hated you—do you remember? I was a long way off from where I was walking. I hadn’t thought where I was, or how far I’d gone. I was about a million miles away, and then I came back with a thud that pretty well broke me. And I was right under the Tane Head cliff, with what I thought was your dead body at my feet.”

  After a long time she said.

  “You didn’t tell anyone—”

  “No, Lisle—it broke me. I came back to the wall and stayed there half the night. It wasn’t only the shock of thinking it was you—it was—Dale. If I could think it was you, why so could he. Everything I had been fighting came back and got me down. I didn’t know what to do. I made up my mind that unless I was called at the inquest I would hold my tongue. I didn’t want to bring you in for one thing. And my finding her proved nothing. It didn’t help Pell.”

  She said in a curious still voice,

  “Dale said you killed Lydia—and Cissie. He said you were trying to kill me—because of Tanfield. He said—”

  “And you believed him!”

  “I don’t know—I don’t think I believed anything—any more.”

  “When you came down to dinner you looked at me as if I wasn’t there.”

  Her voice lifted on a sighing breath.

  “I didn’t feel—as if—any of us were there—really. It was like a horrible dream.”

  “He’d been telling you then?”

  “Yes. He told me. It made me feel—” She stopped as if she was searching for a word, and then said, “stunned.”

  There was a moment’s silence before she spoke again.

  “Rafe—what happened to your cigarette-case—the one I gave you for your birthday?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Yes, I know. I wanted to know if you did.”

  He said, “Dale took it—on that Wednesday night. His case was empty. He saw mine lying there on one of the chairs, and he picked it up and put it in his pocket when he and Alicia went off.”

  “Did he know that you had seen him take it?”

  “Oh, yes, he knew. What did he tell you about it?”

  “He said Alicia found it up on the cliff where Cissie went over. He said that she was looking for her emerald and diamond clip. And she found your case.”

  Rafe made a movement.

  “And that is very likely! I wondered what she was doing up there this morning.” He gave a curious laugh. “It really was only this morning, but it feels like years ago. I don’t suppose she dropped her clip at all, but Dale knew he had dropped my case up there, and he sent her to look for it.”

  The strangest part of all this strange business was the quiet way in which they talked it over. There had been passion and racking fear, the action and reaction of hatred, suspicion, and doubt. There had been first the slow decay, and then the violent death of hope, and faith, and love. There had been floodtides of emotion. Now all was spent, was gone, was over. They spoke to one another without effort or reserve. Neither could see the other’s face, but to each the other’s thought was most simple, plain, and clear.

  After a long pause Lisle said,

  “Alicia—did she know?”

  There was no answer. There never was to be any answer to that. Just how much Alicia knew or guessed about Lydia—about Cissie, only Alicia herself could have told, and Alicia would never tell.

  The silence spoke. And then Lisle spoke, breaking it.

  “The water is rising—”

  46

  FROM THE WITHDRAWING of the tide until sundown the pool had reflected and absorbed the light and heat of the day. The water was still warm. It had not seemed so to Lisle, but she became aware of it now when the new cold water brought by the rising tide came eddying in against her breast, against her shoulders, rocking her from her unsteady footing. She held to the belt with one hand and steadied herself against the rocky wall with the other.

  The new cold ripple ebbed, came again, rocking, chilling, lifting her—ebb and flow, and ebb and flow again—a tide within a tide, but each flow strong
er and colder than the last.

  The time came when Rafe’s hand, reaching downwards, closed on her wrist. For Lisle the worst was over then. For Rafe all the hardest part was yet to come. The rock on which he lay was slimy with weed. There was nothing to hold to. He had perforce to wait until the water was within three feet of the brink before he could get Lisle over it. She was numb and exhausted. He would have to get her out between the rocks to the sandy ridge, then round the point and in, between the rocks on the other side—just the one possible channel in either case, where the shingle spit ran in on this side and the tongue of sand upon the other. Both were deep under the water now, since the tide, which had been held up by the ridge, was by this time well over it, flooding all the lower levels.

  If he had not known every rock on the beach, every twist of the channel, it would have been a very forlorn hope indeed. Even in daylight no one in his senses would have attempted to find his way amongst these formidable and jagged rocks with no real depth of water over them. The worst of them were upon this side of the Shepstone Wall. If he could reach the ridge with Lisle he could bring her in. But he had to reach the ridge. At all times a poor swimmer, she was in no case to help herself or him.

  He made her float, and sliding down into the water, began to pilot her towards the ridge, swimming slowly and with extreme caution, one arm about her, his eyes straining to find each landmark.

  The summer sky is never quite dark. On a clear July night there is always a faint, mysterious light under which shapes and masses appear without detail but with varying degrees of solidity. To Rafe these vague shapes possessed their unseen contours. There was not one of them which he could not call from its obscurity and see it in his mind as he had seen it unnumbered times under the light of day.