The address to which I was now proceeding, led me some distance away
from Mr. Sherwin's place of abode, in the direction of the populous
neighbourhood which lies on the western side of the Edgeware Road. The
house of Margaret's aunt was plainly enough indicated to me, as soon
as I entered the street where it stood, by the glare of light from the
windows, the sound of dance music, and the nondescript group of cabmen
and linkmen, with their little train of idlers in attendance,
assembled outside the door. It was evidently a very large party. I
hesitated about going in.
My sensations were not those which fit a man for exchanging
conventional civilities with perfect strangers; I felt that I showed
outwardly the fever of joy and expectation within me. Could I preserve
my assumed character of a mere friend of the family, in Margaret's
presence?--and on this night too, of all others? It was far more
probable that my behaviour, if I went to the party, would betray
everything to everybody assembled. I determined to walk about in the
neighbourhood of the house, until twelve o'clock; and then to go into
the hall, and send up my card to Mr. Mannion, with a message on it,
intimating that I was waiting below to accompany him to North Villa
with Margaret.
I crossed the street, and looked up again at the house from the
pavement opposite. Then lingered a little, listening to the music as
it reached me through the windows, and imagining to myself Margaret's
occupation at that moment. After this, I turned away; and set forth
eastward on my walk, careless in which direction I traced my steps.
I felt little impatience, and no sense of fatigue; for in less than
two hours more I knew that I should see my wife again. Until then, the
present had no existence for me--I lived in the past and future. I
wandered indifferently along lonely bye-streets, and crowded
thoroughfares. Of all the sights which attend a night-walk in a great
city, not one attracted my notice. Uninformed and unobservant, neither
saddened nor startled, I passed through the glittering highways of
London. All sounds were silent to me save the love-music of my own
thoughts; all sights had vanished before the bright form that moved
through my bridal dream. Where was my world, at that moment? Narrowed
to the cottage in the country which was to receive us on the morrow.
Where were the beings in the world? All merged in one--Margaret.
Sometimes, my thoughts glided back, dreamily and voluptuously, to the
day when I first met her. Sometimes, I recalled the summer evenings
when we sat and read together out of the same book; and, once more, it
was as if I breathed with the breath, and hoped with the hopes, and
longed with the old longings of those days. But oftenest it was with
the morrow that my mind was occupied. The first dream of all young
men--the dream of living rapturously with the woman they love, in a
secret retirement kept sacred from friends and from strangers alike,
was now my dream; to be realised in a few hours, to be realised with
my waking on the morning which was already at hand!
For the last quarter of an hour of my walk, I must have been
unconsciously retracing my steps towards the house of Margaret's aunt.
I came in sight of it again, just as the sound of the neighbouring
church clocks, striking eleven, roused me from my abstraction. More
cabs were in the street; more people were gathered about the door, by
this time. Was all this bustle, the bustle of arrival or of departure?
Was the party about to break up, at an hour when parties usually
begin? I determined to go nearer to the house, and ascertain whether
the music had ceased, or not.
I had approached close enough to hear the notes of the harp and
pianoforte still sounding as gaily as ever, when the house-door was
suddenly flung open for the departure of a lady and gentleman. The
light from the hall-lamps fell on their faces; and showed me Margaret
and Mr. Mannion.
Going home already! An hour and a half before it was time to return!
Why?
There could be but one reason. Margaret was thinking of me, and of
what I should feel if I called at North Villa, and had to wait for her
till past midnight. I ran forward to speak to them, as they descended
the steps; but exactly at the same moment, my voice was overpowered,
and my further progress barred, by a scuffle on the pavement among the
people who stood between us. One man said that his pocket had been
picked; others roared to him that they had caught the thief. There was
a fight--the police came up--I was surrounded on all sides by a
shouting, struggling mob that seemed to have gathered in an instant.
Before I could force myself out of the crowd, and escape into the
road, Margaret and Mr. Mannion had hurried into a cab. I just saw the
vehicle driving off rapidly, as I got free. An empty cab was standing
near me--I jumped into it directly--and told the man to overtake them.
After having waited my time so patiently, to let a mere accident stop
me from going home with them, as I had resolved, was not to be thought
of for a moment. I was hot and angry, after my contest with the crowd;
and could have flogged on the miserable cab-horse with my own hand,
rather than have failed in my purpose.
We were just getting closer behind them: I had just put my head out of
the window to call to them, and to bid the man who was driving me,
call, too--when their cab abruptly turned down a bye-street, in a
direction exactly opposite to the direction which led to North Villa.
What did this mean? Why were they not going straight home?
The cabman asked me whether he should not hail them before they got
farther away from us; frankly confessing, as he put the question, that
his horse was nothing like equal to the pace of the horse ahead.
Mechanically, without assignable purpose or motive, I declined his
offer, and told him simply to follow at any distance he could. While
the words passed my lips, a strange sensation stole over me: I seemed
to be speaking as the mere mouthpiece of some other voice. From
feeling hot, and moving about restlessly the moment before, I felt
unaccountably cold, and sat still now. What caused this?
My cab stopped. I looked out, and saw that the horse had fallen.
"We've lots of time, Sir," said the driver, as he coolly stepped off
the box, "they are just pulling up further down the road." I gave him
some money, and got out immediately--determined to overtake them on
foot.
It was a very lonely place--a colony of half-finished streets, and
half-inhabited houses, which had grown up in the neighbourhood of a
great railway station. I heard the fierce scream of the whistle, and
the heaving, heavy throb of the engine starting on its journey, as I
advanced along the gloomy Square in which I now found myself. The cab
I had been following stood at a turning which led into a long street,
occupied towards the farther end, by shops closed for the night, and
at the end nearest me, apparently by private houses only. Margaret and
Mr. Mannion hastily left the cab, and without looking either to the
right or the left, hurried down the street. They stopped at the ninth
house. I followed just in time to hear the door closed on them, and to
count the number of doors intervening between that door and the
Square.
The awful thrill of a suspicion which I hardly knew yet for what it
really was, began to creep over me--to creep like a dead-cold touch
crawling through and through me to the heart. I looked up at the
house. It was an hotel--a neglected, deserted, dreary-looking
building. Still acting mechanically; still with no definite impulse
that I could recognise, even if I felt it, except the instinctive
resolution to follow them into the house, as I had already followed
them through the street--I walked up to the door, and rang the bell.
It was answered by a waiter--a mere lad. As the light in the passage
fell on my face, he paused in the act of addressing me, and drew back
a few steps. Without stopping for any explanations, I closed the door
behind me, and said to him at once:
"A lady and gentleman came into this hotel a little while ago."
"What may your business be?"--He hesitated, and added in an altered
tone, "I mean, what may you want with them, Sir?"
"I want you to take me where I can hear their voices, and I want
nothing more. Here's a sovereign for you, if you do what I ask."
His eyes fastened covetously on the gold, as I held it before them. He
retired a few steps on tiptoe, and listened at the end of the passage.
I heard nothing but the thick, rapid beating of my own heart. He came
back, muttering to himself: "Master's safe at supper down stairs--I'll
risk it! You'll promise to go away directly," he added, whispering to
me, "and not disturb the house? We are quiet people here, and can't
have anything like a disturbance. Just say at once, will you promise
to step soft, and not speak a word?"
"I promise."
"This way then, Sir--and mind you don't forget to step soft."
A strange coldness and stillness, an icy insensibility, a
dream-sensation of being impelled by some hidden, irresistible agency,
possessed me, as I followed him upstairs. He showed me softly into an
empty room; pointed to one of the walls, whispering, "It's only boards
papered over--" and then waited, keeping his eyes anxiously and
steadily fixed upon all my movements.
I listened; and through the thin partition, I heard voices--_her_
voice, and _his_ voice. _I heard and I knew_--knew my degradation in
all its infamy, knew my wrongs in all their nameless horror. He was
exulting in the patience and secrecy which had brought success to the
foul plot, foully hidden for months on months; foully hidden until the
very day before I was to have claimed as my wife, a wretch as guilty
as himself!
I could neither move nor breathe. The blood surged and heaved upward
to my brain; my heart strained and writhed in anguish; the life within
me raged and tore to get free. Whole years of the direst mental and
bodily agony were concentrated in that one moment of helpless,
motionless torment. I never lost the consciousness of suffering. I
heard the waiter say, under his breath, "My God! he's dying." I felt
him loosen my cravat--I knew that he dashed cold water over me;
dragged me out of the room; and, opening a window on the landing, held
me firmly where the night-air blew upon my face. I knew all this; and
knew when the paroxysm passed, and nothing remained of it, but a
shivering helplessness in every limb.
Erelong, the power of thinking began to return to me by degrees.
Misery, and shame, and horror, and a vain yearning to hide myself from
all human eyes, and weep out my life in secret, overcame me. Then,
these subsided; and ONE THOUGHT slowly arose in their stead--arose,
and cast down before it every obstacle of conscience, every principle
of education, every care for the future, every remembrance of the
past, every weakening influence of present misery, every repressing
tie of family and home, every anxiety for good fame in this life, and
every idea of the next that was to come. Before the fell poison of
that Thought, all other thoughts--good or evil--died. As it spoke
secretly within me, I felt my bodily strength coming back; a quick
vigour leapt hotly through my frame. I turned, and looked round
towards the room we had just left--my mind was looking at the room
beyond it, the room they were in.
The waiter was still standing by my side, watching me intently. He
suddenly started back; and, with pale face and staring eyes, pointed
down the stairs.
"You go," he whispered, "go directly! You're well now--I'm afraid to
have you here any longer. I saw your look, your horrid look at that
room! You've heard what you wanted for your money--go at once; or, if
I lose my place for it, I'll call out Murder, and raise the house. And
mind this: as true as God's in heaven, I'll warn them both before they
go outside our door!"
Hearing, but not heeding him, I left the house. No voice that ever
spoke, could have called me back from the course on which I was now
bound. The waiter watched me vigilantly from the door, as I went out.
Seeing this, I made a circuit, before I returned to the spot where, as
I had suspected, the cab they had ridden in was still waiting for
them.
The driver was asleep inside. I awoke him; told him I had been sent to
say that he was not wanted again that night: and secured his ready
departure, by at once paying him on his own terms. He drove off; and
the first obstacle on the fatal path which I had resolved to tread
unopposed, was now removed.
As the cab disappeared from my sight, I looked up at the sky. It was
growing very dark. The ragged black clouds, fantastically parted from
each other in island shapes over the whole surface of the heavens,
were fast drawing together into one huge, formless, lowering mass, and
had already hidden the moon for, good. I went back to the street, and
stationed myself in the pitch darkness of a passage which led down a
mews, situated exactly opposite to the hotel.
In the silence and obscurity, in the sudden pause of action while I
now waited and watched, my Thought rose to my lips, and my speech
mechanically formed it into words. I whispered softly to myself: _I
will kill him when he comes out._ My mind never swerved for an instant
from this thought--never swerved towards myself; never swerved towards
_her._ Grief was numbed at my heart; and the consciousness of my own
misery was numbed with grief. Death chills all before it--and Death
and my Thought were one.
Once, while I stood on the watch, a sharp agony of suspense tried me
fiercely.
Just as I had calculated that the time was come which would force them
to depart, in order to return to North Villa by the appointed hour, I
heard the slow, heavy, regular tramp of a footstep advancing along the
street. It was the policeman of the district going his round. As he
approached the entrance to the mews he paused, yawned, stretched his
arms, and began to whistle a tune. If Mannion should come out while he
was there! My blood seemed to stagnate on its course, while I thought
that this might well happen. Suddenly, the man ceased whistling,
looked steadily up and down the street, and tried the door of a house
near him--advanced a few steps--then paused again, and tried another
door--then muttered to himself, in drowsy tones--"I've seen all safe
here already: it's the other street I forgot just now." He turned, and
retraced his way. I fixed my aching eyes vigilantly on the hotel,
while I heard the sound of his footsteps grow fainter and fainter in
the distance. It ceased altogether; and still there was no
change--still the man whose life I was waiting for, never appeared.
Ten minutes after this, so far as I can guess, the door opened; and I
heard Mannion's voice, and the voice of the lad who had let me in.
"Look about you before you go out," said the waiter, speaking in the
passage; "the street's not safe for you." Disbelieving, or affecting
to disbelieve, what he heard, Mannion interrupted the waiter angrily;
and endeavoured to reassure his companion in guilt, by asserting that
the warning was nothing but an attempt to extort money by way of
reward. The man retorted sulkily, that he cared nothing for the
gentleman's money, or the gentleman either. Immediately afterwards an
inner door in the house banged violently; and I knew that Mannion had
been left to his fate.
There was a momentary silence; and then I heard him tell his
accomplice that he would go alone to look for the cab, and that she
had better close the door and wait quietly in the passage till he came
back. This was done. He walked out into the street. It was after
twelve o'clock. No sound of a strange footfall was audible--no soul
was at hand to witness, and prevent, the coming struggle. His life was
mine. His death followed him as fast as my feet followed, while I was
now walking on his track.
He looked up and down, from the entrance to the street, for the cab.
Then, seeing that it was gone, he hastily turned back. At that instant
I met him face to face. Before a word could be spoken, even before a
look could be exchanged, my hands were on his throat.
He was a taller and heavier man than I was; and struggled with me,
knowing that he was struggling for his life. He never shook my grasp
on him for a moment; but he dragged me out into the road--dragged me
away eight or ten yards from the street. The heavy gasps of
approaching suffocation beat thick on my forehead from his open mouth:
he swerved to and fro furiously, from side to side; and struck at me,
swinging his clenched fists high above his head. I stood firm, and
held him away at arm's length. As I dug my feet into the ground to
steady myself, I heard the crunching of stones--the road had been
newly mended with granite. Instantly, a savage purpose goaded into
fury the deadly resolution by which I was possessed. I shifted my hold
to the back of his neck, and the collar of his coat, and hurled him,
with the whole impetus of the raging strength that was let loose in
me, face downwards, on to the stones.
In the mad triumph of that moment, I had already stooped towards him,
as he lay insensible beneath me, to lift him again, and beat out of
him, on the granite, not life only, but the semblance of humanity as
well; when, in the blank stillness that followed the struggle, I heard
the door of the hotel in the street open once more. I left him
directly, and ran back from the square--I knew not with what motive,
or what idea--to the spot.
On the steps of the house, on the threshold of that accursed place,
stood the woman whom God's minister had given to me in the sight of
God, as my wife.
One long pang of shame and despair shot through my heart as I looked
at her, and tortured out of its trance the spirit within me. Thousands
on thousands of thoughts seemed to be whirling in the wildest
confusion through and through my brain--thoughts, whose track was a
track of fire--thoughts that struck me with a hellish torment of
dumbness, at the very time when I would have purchased with my life
the power of a moment's speech. Voiceless and tearless, I went up to
her, and took her by the arm, and drew her away from the house. There
was some vague purpose in me, as I did this, of never quitting my hold
of her, never letting her stir from me by so much as an inch, until I
had spoken certain words to her. What words they were, and when I
should utter them, I could not tell.
The cry for mercy was on her lips, but the instant our eyes met, it
died away in long, low, hysterical moanings. Her cheeks were ghastly,
her features were rigid, her eyes glared like an idiot's; guilt and
terror had made her hideous to look upon already.
I drew her onward a few paces towards the Square. Then I stopped,
remembering the body that lay face downwards on the road. The savage
strength of a few moments before, had left me from the time when I
first saw her. I now reeled where I stood, from sheer physical
weakness. The sound of her pantings and shudderings, of her abject
inarticulate murmurings for mercy, struck me with a supernatural
terror. My fingers trembled round her arm, the perspiration dripped
down my face, like rain; I caught at the railings by my side, to keep
myself from falling. As I did so, she snatched her arm from my grasp,
as easily as if I had been a child; and, with a cry for help, fled
towards the further end of the street.
Still, the strange instinct of never losing hold of her, influenced
me. I followed, staggering like a drunken man. In a moment, she was
out of my reach; in another, out of my sight. I went on, nevertheless;
on, and on, and on, I knew not whither. I lost all ideas of time and
distance. Sometimes I went round and round the same streets, over and
over again. Sometimes I hurried in one direction, straight forward.
Wherever I went, it seemed to me that she was still just before; that
her track and my track were one; that I had just lost my hold of her,
and that she was just starting on her flight.
I remember passing two men in this way, in some great thoroughfare.
They both stopped, turned, and walked a few steps after me. One
laughed at me, as a drunkard. The other, in serious tones, told him to
be silent; for I was not drunk, but mad--he had seen my face as I
passed under a gas-lamp, and he knew that I was mad.
"MAD!"--that word, as I heard it, rang after me like a voice of
judgment. "MAD!"--a fear had come over me, which, in all its frightful
complication, was expressed by that one word--a fear which, to the man
who suffers it, is worse even than the fear of death; which no human
language ever has conveyed, or ever will convey, in all its horrible
reality, to others. I had pressed onward, hitherto, because I saw a
vision that led me after it--a beckoning shadow, ahead, darker even
than the night darkness. I still pressed on, now; but only because I
was afraid to stop.
I know not how far I had gone, when my strength utterly failed me, and
I sank down helpless, in a lonely place where the houses were few and
scattered, and trees and fields were dimly discernible in the
obscurity beyond. I hid my face in my hands, and tried to assure
myself that I was still in possession of my senses. I strove hard to
separate my thoughts; to distinguish between my recollections; to
extricate from the confusion within me any one idea, no matter
what--and I could not do it. In that awful struggle for the mastery
over my own mind, all that had passed, all the horror of that horrible
night, became as nothing to me. I raised myself, and looked up again,
and tried to steady my reason by the simplest means--even by
endeavouring to count all the houses within sight. The darkness
bewildered me. Darkness?--_Was_ it dark? or was day breaking yonder,
far away in the murky eastern sky? Did I know what I saw? Did I see
the same thing for a few moments together? What was this under me?
Grass? yes! cold, soft, dewy grass. I bent down my forehead upon it,
and tried, for the last time, to steady my faculties by praying; tried
if I could utter the prayer which I had known and repeated every day
from childhood--the Lord's Prayer. The Divine Words came not at my
call--no! not one of them, from the beginning to the end! I started up
on my knees. A blaze of lurid sunshine flashed before my eyes; a
hell-blaze of brightness, with fiends by millions, raining down out of
it on my head; then a rayless darkness--the darkness of the
blind--then God's mercy at last--the mercy of utter oblivion.
* * * * *
When I recovered my consciousness, I was lying on the couch in my own
study. My father was supporting me on the pillow; the doctor had his
fingers on my pulse; and a policeman was telling them where he had
found me, and how he had brought me home.