Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  They walked slowly, for she was too much confused to hasten her steps. Her inexplicable mistake troubled her terribly. She remembered how she had warned Lord Redin not to tell her any secrets, and how seriously she, the most discreet of women, had resolved never to reveal what he had said. But the impression of his story had been so much more direct and strong than even the first words Griggs had spoken, that so soon as she had realized that the latter was speaking approximately of the same subject, she had lost the thread of what he was saying and had seemed to hear Lord Redin’s dreadful tale all over again. She thought that she was losing her head.

  It was almost quite dark when they reached the other side of the high altar. Griggs walked beside her in silence, trying to understand the meaning of what she had said.

  The gloom was terrible. The enormous statues loomed faintly like vast ghosts, high up, between the floor and the roof, their whiteness glimmering where there seemed to be nothing else but darkness below them and above them. A low, far sound that was a voice but not a word, trembled in the air. Francesca shuddered.

  “They have not gone yet,” said Griggs. “They are still talking. But we must hurry.”

  “No,” said Francesca, “that was not any one talking.” And her teeth chattered. “Give me your arm, please — I am frightened.”

  He held out his arm till she could feel it in the dark, and she took it. He pressed her hand to his side and drew her along, for he feared that the doors might be already shut.

  “Not so fast! Oh, not so fast, please!” she cried. “I shall fall. They do not shut the doors—”

  “Yes, they do! Let me carry you. I can run with you in the dark — there is no time to be lost!”

  “No, no! I can walk faster — but there is really no danger—”

  It is a very long way from the high altar to the main entrance of the church. Francesca was breathless when they reached the door and Griggs lifted the heavy leathern curtain. If the door had been still open, he would have seen the twilight from the porch at once. Instead, all was black and close and smelled of leather. Francesca was holding his sleeve, afraid of losing him.

  “It is too late,” he said quietly. “We are probably locked in. We will try the door of the Sacristy.”

  He seized her arm and hurried her along into the south aisle. He struck his shoulder violently against the base of the pillar he passed in the darkness, but he did not stop. Almost instinctively he found the door, for he could not see it. Even the hideous skeleton which supports a black marble drapery above it was not visible in the gloom. He found the bevelled edge of the smoothly polished panel and pushed. But it would not yield.

  “We are locked in,” he said, in the same quiet tone as before.

  Francesca uttered a low cry of terror and then was silent.

  “Cannot you break the door?” she asked suddenly.

  “No,” he answered. “Nothing short of a battering-ram could move it.”

  “Try,” she said. “You are so strong — the lock might give way.”

  To satisfy her he braced himself and heaved against the panel with all his gigantic strength. In the dark she could hear his breath drawn through his nostrils.

  “It will not move,” he said, desisting. “We shall have to spend the night here. I am very sorry.”

  For some moments Francesca said nothing, overcome by her terror of the situation. Griggs stood still, with his back to the polished door, trying to see her in the gloom. Then he felt her closer to him and heard her small feet moving on the pavement.

  “We must make the best of it,” he said at last. “It is never quite dark near the high altar. I daresay, too, that there is still a little twilight where we were sitting. At least, there is a carpet there and there are benches. We can sit there until it is later. Then you can lie down upon the bench. I will make a pillow for you with my overcoat. It is warm, and I shall not need it.”

  He made a step forwards, and she heard him moving.

  “Do not leave me!” she cried, in sudden terror.

  He felt her grasp his arm convulsively in the dark, and he felt her hands shaking.

  “Do not be frightened,” he said, in his quiet voice. “Dead people do no harm, you know. It is only imagination.”

  She shuddered as he groped his way with her toward the nave. They passed the pillar and saw the soft light of the ninety little flames of the huge golden lamps around the central shrine below the high altar. Far beyond, the great windows showed faintly in the height of the blackness. They walked more freely, keeping in the middle of the church. In the distant chapels on each side a few little lamps glimmered like fireflies. Before the last chapel on the right, the Chapel of the Sacrament, Francesca paused, instinctively holding fast to Griggs’s arm, and they both bent one knee, as all Catholics do, who pass before it. But when they reached the shrine, Francesca loosed her hold and sank upon her knees, resting her arms upon the broad marble of the balustrade. Griggs knelt a moment beside her, by force of habit, then rose and waited, looking about him into the depths of blackness, and reflecting upon the best spot in which to pass the night.

  She remained kneeling a long time, praying more or less consciously, but aware that it was a relief to be near a little light after passing through the darkness. Her mind was as terribly confused as her companion’s was utterly calm and indifferent. If he had been alone he would have sat down upon a step until he was sleepy and then he would have stretched himself upon one of the benches in the transept. But to Francesca it was unspeakably dreadful.

  The strangeness of the whole situation forced itself upon her more and more, when she thought of rising from her knees and going back to the bench. She felt a womanly shyness about keeping close to her companion, her hand on his arm, for hours together, but she knew that the terror she should feel of being left alone, even for an instant, or of merely thinking that she was to be left alone, would more than overcome that if she went away from the lights. She would grasp his arm and hold it tightly.

  Then she felt ashamed of herself. She had always been told that she came of a brave race. She had never been in danger, and there was really no danger now. It was absurd to remain on her knees for the sake of the lamps. She rose to her feet and turned. Griggs was not looking at her, but at the ornaments on the altar. The soft glimmer lighted up his dark face. A moment after she had risen he came forward. She meant to propose that they should go back to the transept, but just then she shuddered again.

  “Let us sit down here, on the step,” she said, suddenly.

  “If you like,” he answered. “Wait a minute,” he added, and he pulled off his overcoat.

  He spread a part of it on the step, and rolled the rest into a pillow against which she could lean, and he held it in place while she sat down. She thanked him, and he sat down beside her. At first, as she turned from the lamps, the nave was like a fathomless black wall. Neither spoke for some time. Griggs broke the silence when he supposed that she was sufficiently recovered to talk quietly, for he had been thinking of what she had said, and it was almost clear to him at last.

  “I should like to speak to you quite frankly, if you will allow me,” he said gravely. “May I?”

  “Certainly.”

  “The few words you said about Lord Redin’s story have explained a great many things which I never understood,” said Griggs. “Is it too much to ask that you should tell me everything you know?”

  “I would rather not say anything more,” answered Francesca. “I am very much ashamed of having betrayed his secret. Besides, what is to be gained by your knowing a few more details? It is bad enough as it is.”

  “It is more or less the story of my life,” he said, almost indifferently.

  She turned her head slowly and tried to see his face. She could just distinguish the features, cold and impassive.

  “I came to you to ask you to warn Dalrymple of a danger,” he continued, as she did not speak. “I knew that fact, but not the reason why his life was and is thr
eatened. Unless I have mistaken what you said, I understand it now. It is a much stronger one than I should ever have guessed. Lord Redin ran away with your cousin, and made it appear that he had carried off Stefanone’s daughter. Stefanone has waited patiently for nearly a quarter of a century. He has found Dalrymple at last and means to kill him. He will succeed, unless you can make Dalrymple understand that the danger is real. I have no evidence on which I could have the man arrested, and I have no personal influence in Rome. You have. You would find no difficulty in having Stefanone kept out of the city. And you can make Dalrymple see the truth, since he has confided in you. Will you do that? He will not believe me, and you can save him. Besides, he will not see me. I have tried twice to-day. He has made up his mind that he will not see me.”

  “I will do my best,” said Francesca, leaning her head back against the marble rail, and half closing her eyes. “How terrible it all is!”

  “Yes. I suppose that is the word,” said Griggs, indifferently. “Sacrilege, suicide, and probably murder to come.”

  She was shocked by the perfectly emotionless way in which he spoke of Gloria’s death, so much shocked that she drew a short, quick breath between her teeth as though she had hurt herself. Griggs heard it.

  “What is the matter?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “I thought something hurt you.”

  “No — nothing.”

  She was silent again.

  “Yes,” he continued, in a tone of cold speculation, “I suppose that any one would call it terrible. At all events, it is curious, as a sequence of cause and effect, from one tragedy to another.”

  “Please — please do not speak of it all like that—” Francesca felt herself growing angry with him.

  “How should I speak of it?” he asked. “It is an extraordinary concatenation of events. I look upon the whole thing as very curious, especially since you have given me the key to it all.”

  Francesca was moved to anger, taking the defence of the dead Gloria, as almost any woman would have done. At the moment Paul Griggs repelled her even more than Lord Redin. It seemed to her that there was something dastardly in his indifference.

  “Have you no heart?” she asked suddenly.

  “No, I am dead,” he answered, in his clear, lifeless voice, that might have been a ghost’s.

  The words made her shiver, and she felt as though her hair were moving. From his face, as she had last seen it, and from his voice, he might almost have been dead, as he said he was, like the thousands of silent ones in the labyrinths under her feet, and she alone alive in the midst of so much death.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, and her own voice trembled in spite of herself.

  “It is very like being dead,” he answered thoughtfully. “I cannot feel anything. I cannot understand why any one else should. Everything is the same to me. The world is a white blank to me, and one place is exactly like any other place.”

  “But why? What has happened to you?” asked Francesca.

  “You know. You sent me those letters.”

  “What letters?”

  “The package Reanda gave you before he died.”

  “Yes. What was in it? I told you that I did not know, when I wrote to you. I remember every word I wrote.”

  “I know. But I thought that you at least guessed. They were Gloria’s letters to her husband.”

  “Her old letters, before—” Francesca stopped short.

  “No,” he answered, with the same unnatural quiet. “All the letters she wrote him afterwards — when we were together.”

  “All those letters?” cried Francesca, suddenly understanding. “Oh no — no! It is not possible! He could not, he would not, have done anything so horrible.”

  “He did,” said Griggs, calmly. “I had supposed that she loved me. He had his vengeance. He proved to me that she did not. I hope he is satisfied with the result. Yes,” he continued, after a moment’s pause, “it was the cruelest thing that ever one man did to another. I spent a bad night, I remember. On the top of the package was the last letter she wrote him, just before she killed herself. She loathed me, she said, she hated me, she shivered at my touch. She feared me so that she acted a comedy of love, in terror of her life, after she had discovered that she hated me. She need not have been afraid. Why should I have hurt her? In that last letter, she put her wedding ring with a lock of her hair wound in and out of it. Reanda knew what he was doing when he sent it to me. Do you wonder that it has deadened me to everything?”

  “Oh, how could he do it? How could he!” Francesca repeated, for the worst of it all to her was the unutterable cruelty of the man she had believed so gentle.

  “I suppose it was natural,” said Griggs. “I loved the woman, and he knew it. I fancy few men have loved much more sincerely than I loved her, even after she was dead. I was not always saying so. I am not that kind of man. Besides, men who live by stringing words together for money do not value them much in their own lives. But I worked for her. I did the best I could. Even she must have known that I loved her.”

  “I know you did. I cannot understand how you can speak of her at all.” Francesca wondered at the man.

  “She? She is no more to me than Queen Christina, over there in her tomb in the dark! For that matter, nothing else has any meaning, either.”

  For a long time Francesca said nothing. She sat quite still, resting the back of her head against the marble, in the awful silence under the faint lights that glimmered above the great tomb.

  “You have told me the most dreadful thing I ever heard,” she said at last, in a low tone. “Is she nothing to you? Really nothing? Can you never think kindly of her again?”

  “No. Why should I? That is—” he hesitated. “I could not explain it,” he said, and was silent.

  “It does not seem human,” said Francesca. “You would have a memory of her — something — some touch of sadness — I wonder whether you really loved her as much as you thought you did?”

  Griggs turned upon Francesca slowly, his hands clasped upon one knee.

  “You do not know what such love means,” he said slowly. “It is God — faith — goodness — everything. It is heaven on earth, and earth in heaven, in one heart. When it is gone there is nothing left. It went hard. It will not come back now. The heart itself is gone. There is nothing for it to come to. You think me cold, you are shocked because I speak indifferently of her. She lied to me. She lied and acted in every word and deed of her life with me. She deceived herself a little at first, and she deceived me mortally afterwards. It was all an immense, loathsome, deadly lie. I lived through the truth. Why should I wish to go back to the lie again? She died, telling me that she died for me. She died, having written to Reanda that she died for him. I do not judge her. God will. But God Himself could not make me love the smallest shadow of her memory. It is impossible. I am beyond life. I am outside it. My eternity has begun.”

  “Is it not a little for her sake that you wish to save her father?” asked Francesca.

  “No. It is a matter of honour, and nothing else, since I injured him, as the world would say, by taking his daughter from her husband. Do you understand? Can you put yourself a little in my position? It is not because I care whether he lives or dies, or dies a natural death or is stabbed in the back by a peasant. It is because I ought to care. I do many things because I ought to care to do them, though the things and their consequences are all one to me, now.”

  “It cannot last,” said Francesca, sadly. “You will change as you grow older.”

  “No. That is a thing you can never understand,” he answered. “I am two individuals. The one is what you see, a man more or less like other men, growing older — a man who has a certain mortal, earthly memory of that dead woman, when the real man is unconscious. But the real man is beyond growing old, because he is beyond feeling anything. He is stationary, outside of life. The world is a blank to him and always will be.”

  His voice gre
w more and more expressionless as he spoke. Francesca felt that she could not pity him as she had pitied poor Lord Redin when she had seen him going away alone. The man beside her was in earnest, and was as far beyond woman’s pity as he was beyond woman’s love. Yet she no longer felt repelled by him since she had understood what he had suffered. Perhaps she herself, suffering still in her heart, wished that she might be even as he was, beyond the possibility of pain, even though beyond the hope of happiness. He wanted nothing, he asked for nothing, and he was not afraid to be alone with his own soul, as she was sometimes. The other man had asked for her friendship. It could mean nothing to Paul Griggs. If love were nothing, what could friendship be?

  Yet there was something lofty and grand about such loneliness as his. She could not but feel that, now that she knew all. She thought of him as she sat beside him in the monumental silence of the enormous sepulchre, and she guessed of depths in his soul like the deepness of the shadows above her and before her and around her.

  “My suffering seems very small, compared with yours,” she said softly, almost to herself.

  Somehow she knew that he would understand her, though perhaps her knowledge was only hope.

  “Why should you suffer at all?” he asked. “You have never done anything wrong. Nothing, of all this, is your fault. It was all fatal, from the first, and you cannot blame yourself for anything that has happened.”

  “I do,” she answered, in a low voice. “Indeed I do.”

  “You are wrong. You are not to blame. Dalrymple was — Maria Braccio — I — Gloria — we four. But you! What have you done? Compared with us you are a saint on earth!”

  She hesitated a moment before she spoke. Then her voice came in a broken way.

  “I loved Angelo Reanda. I know it, now that I have lost him.”

  Griggs barely heard the last words, but he bent his head gravely, and said nothing in answer.

  CHAPTER XLVIII.

  THE STILLNESS WAS all around them and seemed to fold them together as they sat side by side. A deep sigh quivered and paused and was drawn again almost with a gasp that stirred the air. Suddenly Francesca’s face was hidden in her hands, and her head was bowed almost to her knees. A moment more, and she sobbed aloud, wordless, as though her soul were breaking from her heart.