by Grant Allen
When the grave was dug he carried out those two tenderly once more in his arms, and laid them side by side with their faces turned towards one another in the trench he had thus made to receive them. Over the top of the trench he poured buckets of water, and in half an hour so intense was the cold on that bitter, glittering January day, the whole mass was frozen stiff and solid together as a granite column.
After that Jake took Lucy’s little book from her leather desk, and slowly and solemnly, in spite of many stumbling efforts, read over the grave, with blinding tears and choking voice, the Church of England burial service. At times his tongue failed him and his lips quivered, but still he went on alone in the clearing. Come what might, Lucy should not be buried without Christian burial. As he finished he flung himself passionately on the grave, and cried out aloud from his very heart in a broken voice, “Tom, Tom, I was your friend, and I killed you! I killed you!” But he didn’t dare to say a last farewell to Lucy. Murderer that he was, he was unworthy to speak to her.
From the grave Jake turned once more, awful in his loneliness, into the bare hut, where the baby lay crying and stretching out its nine months’ arms for its dead mother. Jake took it up in his fatherly hands and kissed it, as he had kissed it many times before, and mixed it some food with broken biscuit and condensed milk, and fed it with a spoon till it smiled and was happy.
Then he wrapped the baby in a thick warm skin, rolled in her dress all their remaining bank-notes, strapped his knapsack on his back, full of condensed milk, fastened the snow-shoes on his weary feet, and set out through the snow with the baby in his arms, pressed close to his breast, in a paroxysm of remorse, to give himself up for the double murder to the authorities at Ottawa.
THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT.
I.
It was a woodland slope behind St. Pierre-les-Bains. Basil Hume was walking alone on the edge of the hillside. Everybody knows St. Pierre, that dream of peace among the Vosges mountains — a nestling town, high perched in a nook above a deep blue lake, amid a shadowy land of spreading pine forest, grey granite hills, and great ice-worn boulders. Basil had finished his day’s work among the dappled lights of the upland, and was strolling along now, with his sketch-book hanging idly in one hand by his side, taking mental notes as he went of evening effects between the branches of the forest. His head, as he strolled on, was crammed full of Marcella. He called her “Marcella” to himself, in his happy day dreams, though to her face, of course, like all the rest of the world, he spoke of her always as “Mrs. Griswold.” She had filled a large place in the painter’s mind those last six weeks: the Vosges was to Basil one long idyll of Marcella.
Suddenly — unexpectedly — at a sharp turn in the footpath, he heard, close by, the delicate rustling of a woman’s gown against the hard glittering rock, into which a way had been worn deep for future traffic by countless naked or sabot-clad feet of mountain peasants. He started at the sound. His heart beat quicker. Next moment he looked up: Marcella stood before him.
She was dressed as usual in her simple English morning costume; tailor-made, all neatness. In her left hand she held carelessly a little sketch-book; her right grasped a freshly gathered spray of pale white butterfly orchid. Its ghostly thin flowers, with their long pale streamers and their faint tinge of green, seemed to suit most strangely with her soft childlike beauty. To cover the embarrassment of the sudden meeting, she held up the pallid witch-blossoms before Basil’s eyes.
“What do you say to that, Mr. Hume?” she asked the admiring painter, with one of her sunny smiles. “Now, aren’t they just beautiful?”
Basil took the spray, trembling, from her gloveless fingers. “They are beautiful,” he answered, looking timidly into her eyes and then back again at the flowers. “I know them well of old. They seem just the fit flowers for such country as this, with their transparent whitey-green, and their floating pennons of petals. And how strangely thin! Their colour reminds one, somehow, almost of the mistletoe berry.”
He ceased, and looked hard at her. There was a moment’s pause. Marcella was accustomed to having men look hard at her. Yet this was one of those pauses that seem to call for language. Basil gazed at the sky. Then, after a minute’s delay, he recovered himself with a start, and brought his eyes back with a bound once more from infinity to Marcella.
“I’m lucky to find you alone,” he said. “I — I wanted to speak with you.”
“I’m generally alone,” Marcella said simply, leaning for a moment as she spoke against a great granite boulder.
Basil looked at her with keen eyes. “Your husband’s still in Paris?” he asked.
Marcella nodded assent. “Yes, as usual, in Paris,” she answered. “He cares for nothing else on earth but that — and Vichy, and Monte Carlo, and Trouville, and Homburg.”
“And you stop here still?” the young man ventured to put in.
Marcella gazed up at him. Never before in his life, he thought, had he seen that baby-face so bewitchingly, so provokingly, so enticingly beautiful. Her rich red lips looked for all the world like a pressing invitation to break outright the most brittle of the commandments.
“Yes, I stay here still,” she answered, with a half-muttered sigh. “I shall stay here all summer now, I suppose, till Alvan is graciously pleased to take me to the Riviera. It’s a very good place to shelve a person in, when you want to get rid of them. And indeed,” she added, letting her eyelids drop and her eyes fall gracefully on the glimpses of blue lake and white town far below them, “a prettier place, or a sweeter, one would hardly want to be shelved in.”
Basil hardly knew how to answer her. It was an open secret, to be sure, with all the world of St. Pierre, on what terms she lived with Alvan Griswold; everybody knew it, and everybody talked of it. But Basil had never before heard Marcella herself allude so plainly to her relations with her husband. He was sorry to hear her now. Her frankness gave him an uneasy feeling of boyish awkwardness. To break the silence, he glanced down at the little sketch-book she held idly in her hand.
“You’ve been drawing, I see,” he said ingenuously. “May I look at what you’ve been doing?”
Marcella held the book out half-apologetically towards him, with one finger between the leaves. “But you’ll think nothing of it,” she murmured, with a faint blush on that peach-like cheek. “I can’t bear to show my work to professional artists. One does one’s little best, and then they who know think such very small things of it.”
Basil took the sketch-book shyly from her half-resisting fingers. “I’m sure,” he said, in a serious tone, “I could never think small things of anything on earth you did, Mrs. Griswold.”
And indeed he spoke the truth. Had they been the veriest daubs ever splashed upon paper, he would have found them beautiful — for Marcella had painted them.
He opened the sketch-book at random and turned over a page or two. He had no need for indulgence. The sketches, though amateurish of course, betrayed in every touch a native eye for form and colour.
“But these are the real stuff,” he said, looking into them carefully. “Nothing could be more graceful, now, than the branches of that pine; and then the spots of light on the russet patches of moss — how true, how natural!”
“You really like them?” Marcella cried, leaning eagerly forward. She was a child in her eagerness. “You think they’re not quite hopeless — not quite silly for a beginner?”
Basil held the book in front of him, a little on one side, and eyed the sketches askance, with the searching gaze of a critic. “On the contrary,” he answered slowly, with transparent truth in the very ring of his honest voice, “I should say they display unusual native bent; the light and shade in particular are very neatly handled, and your sense of colour — well, is far above the average. You ought to take lessons.” Then he added, after a short pause, “If some artist friend, now, could give you a hint or two — myself, for example — would you mind my coming round to help you finish off occasionally?”
“O
h, how good of you!” Marcella cried, and looked up at him with that timidly confiding glance which was one of the chief charms of her almost child-like beauty. “It would be so awfully kind of you. I can’t say how grateful your help would make me.”
Basil struck while the iron was hot. “There’s nothing like working at a sketch while it’s fresh in your mind,” he said eagerly. “You’ve been engaged on these pine trees, with the flowers in the foreground, this afternoon, I see. May I come round to your hotel to-night, and volunteer just a hint or two as to technical points in your management of your tree forms?”
Marcella shrank back, a little alarmed and abashed. “Oh no! not to-night,” she said quickly. “I — I have an engagement this evening. Some friends from the Belle-Vue are coming round to see me. But any other night when you happen to be free, I should be so awfully obliged to you. It must be the evening, I suppose? daylight at present is too precious to encroach upon.”
“We’ll make it Wednesday, then,” Basil cried, overjoyed, and hardly able to contain himself. It was a great thing for him to be permitted so to call upon Marcella.
He was just going to move on in the direction of the town, from the moss-clad boulder against which they had been leaning their backs during this brief little colloquy, when, round the same corner where Marcella had surprised him, a handsome man, in knickerbockers, with a soft slouch hat, broke in unexpectedly upon their tête-à-tête with a sudden short whistle. Basil had seen him in the town more than once before, and taken a hand at écarté with him in the rural Casino. He was a handsome young Frenchman, Guy de Marigny by name, and a soldier by profession.
“Ah, te voilà, Marcella!” the new-comer cried in French, blurting out her Christian name before he perceived the stranger. “I’ve been looking for you up and down for the last twenty minutes.” Then he gave a hasty start, and turned more stiffly to Basil, raising his big slouch hat as he spoke. “Monsieur, je vous salue,” he said. “I did not at first perceive that madame was accompanied.”
“So it seems,” Basil replied drily, half sorry that he should have caught the unguarded word, and still more unguarded tutoiement. “I was returning from my day’s work, high up among the hills, and at a bend of the path here I came suddenly upon madame.”
De Marigny smiled and nodded, trying to look unconcerned. Like a well-bred Frenchman, he put the best face upon it.
Marcella turned to him with one of her bewitching smiles. “Mr. Hume has been so kind,” she said; “oh, mais si aimable! mais si aimable! He has promised to come round and help me with my sketches. He’s going to give me lessons in the evening, do you know, beginning immediately.”
“Not to-night?” De Marigny interposed, with an anxious air.
“Oh no, not to-night!” Marcella answered, darting a quick glance at him from under her hat. “I was just explaining that to him.”
“For to-night,” De Marigny went on, turning once more to Basil, “madame is engaged to come to my sister-in-law’s, who holds a reception.”
Basil noted the discrepancy, but was too polite, of course, to call attention to it overtly. Two’s company; three’s none. He had seen enough now to tell him very plainly that Marcella and De Marigny were on those terms of intimacy where a third person is wholly superfluous to the conversation. With some slight excuse for taking a short cut down the hillside, he raised his hat and left them abruptly. But he went down the hill somewhat heavy in heart. Your husband in Paris he accepted, of course, as a necessary element of the situation — all married women have a husband somewhere — but De Marigny, he saw at once, was a far more dangerous rival.
II.
All next day, to relieve his soul, Basil worked hard at his picture, high up on the hillside. He started betimes in the early morning, and didn’t return to his hotel in the town till dinner-time. Even then, as is the wont of artists, he was late for table d’hôte. He came down, hastily dressed, at the end of the fish course, to find his neighbours on either side busily discussing the latest new sensation in the form of a crime passionel. He paid little heed to them. His head was equally divided now between Marcella and his painting; so he took small note of the gossip and twaddle which interests the table d’hôte order of intellect. He merely gathered vaguely from side hints which the others let drop, that somebody somewhere — an American, as he judged — had come home unexpectedly, from the sky or elsewhere, to find his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto, and had shot his rival dead before the very eyes of the unhappy woman. For some minutes Basil said nothing as to how such an appalling act impressed him; but the general truculent satisfaction of the good moral folk at the table by his side, over this vindication, as they considered it, of the ethical proprieties, roused him at last, by pure force of iteration, to something very like indignant horror. He turned to the British matron who sat close at his left.
“What an atrocious crime!” he exclaimed, bridling up. “For my part, I hope the French jury won’t go in, after its kind, for extenuating circumstances.”
Mrs. Paul — that was his neighbour’s name — stared back at him blankly. “As far as I’m concerned,” she answered, in a sharp little treble, “I only wish, myself, he’d shot the woman also.”
Basil started back, aghast. Such bloodthirsty frankness appalled him. He was a clergyman’s son, and had been brought up in the seemingly effete idea that human life possesses a special sanctity. “You can’t surely mean that!” he cried, all trembling with sudden horror. “You can’t mean to say you approve of deliberate murder?”
“I don’t call that murder,” the lady answered quietly. “I think, under the circumstances, the husband had a perfect right to shoot both of them.”
“Everybody thinks so, of course,” a bland, bald-headed old gentleman on the other side of the table interposed with a genial smile. “Most general sympathy has been expressed ... for the husband.”
“For the husband?” Basil exclaimed, taken aback. “Oh no! You can’t mean that! For the murderer, not for the victim!”
“What very hard words you use!” the bland old gentleman retorted mildly.
“I call a murder a murder,” Basil answered, growing hot.
“But every man must surely defend his honour,” Mrs. Paul put in, with a tart little smile of truly Britannic virtue.
Basil looked back at her, astonished. He couldn’t even fathom these people’s point of view. It was far too barbaric, too primitive, too fierce for him. “That may be public opinion,” he said slowly, with genuine earnestness, endeavouring to take it in; “but it’s not Christianity, and it’s not civilization.”
Mrs. Paul sidled away from him with an offended air. It was clear she didn’t even like to sit too close to a man who professed such shockingly humane sentiments.
Basil’s interest in the murder was now fully aroused. “But tell me,” he said eagerly, “who are these people? Where did it all happen? Of course, in Paris?”
“In Paris? Oh dear no,” the bald-headed old gentleman responded with a pitying smile, “Here, here in St. Pierre! Last night, as ever was! The whole town’s ringing with it!”
Basil’s head swam round. He clutched his fork convulsively. “In St. Pierre?” he cried, appalled. “Who — who was the murderer?”
“The gentleman who did it,” Mrs. Paul said sharply, with a very marked emphasis on the corrective phrase, “was Mr. Alvan Griswold, the husband of that pretty little doll who was always at the Casino; and the man he shot was Monsieur Guy de Marigny.”
The salle-à-manger swam round in a tumultuous whirl about Basil as a pivot. His heart rose into his mouth; he could hardly realize it. Then the man who had done this wicked thing was — Marcella’s husband; and the man he had shot was — Marcella’s friend of last night’s adventure!
He paused and let it sink in. He could only grasp it slowly. It was Marcella herself, then, Mrs. Paul so wished Alvan Griswold had shot! Cruel and wicked as he had thought her words before, their cruelty and wickedness came back to him now w
ith ten thousand-fold more force. That wretched gambler, who neglected his wife for the houris of Monte Carlo and the painted Jezebels of Paris, to take vengeance like this upon Marcella and her lover! The bare idea of it appalled him. And what added point to it all in Basil Hume’s mind was that deeper thought he couldn’t conceal from himself even in the first shock of discovery — mere circumstance had prevented him from being himself in De Marigny’s position. They would as easily have condoned the murder of the one man as the murder of the other. Basil raised his eyes from the table. In letters of blood across the blank white wall of the salle-à-manger he seemed to see those five words staring him hard in the face, “Thou shalt do no murder.” He rose from the table abruptly. He could stop there no longer. In some mechanical way he bowed to right and left. His soul was filled with that one absorbing thought.
“For myself,” he said stiffly, as he rose from his chair, “I believe in God’s law. I can neither commit nor condone a murder.”
III.
For the next four or five days nothing was talked of at St. Pierre but the Griswold tragedy. Wherever he went, Basil heard it discussed from every point of view; and, what struck him as odd, while there was plenty of sympathy everywhere for the murderer and his crime, there seemed to be little or none for the victim and his family, or for poor Marcella. Everybody spoke of Alvan Griswold, caught red-handed in his vulgar revenge, as they might speak of a hero. The newspapers chronicled his smallest doings; telegrams carried news of his state of health and of his last remark every day of the week to every corner of Europe. It was sickening — sickening! At first, to be sure, Basil talked much of the matter to all and sundry; but he got so cold a reception for his simple view as to the wrongfulness of bloodshed, that he learnt at last to hold his tongue about it. Every one to whom he spoke seemed to hold the same opinion, that Griswold had done the one thing possible for “a man of honour,” under the circumstances. By slow degrees Basil worked himself up to a state of fiery indignation against this unchristian and uncivilized idea of honour. He could hardly believe that the whole community regarded the crime as St. Pierre regarded it. “It’s infamous,” he said once, “simply cruel and infamous! From the way you all talk, one would think a wife was a man’s absolute chattel, and a chattel so personal, so sacred, so much his own, that the least encroachment upon it justified the possessor in taking without trial the life of his assailant.”
