“Helen! I remember now,” he cried. “I knew it at the time! Don’t you know I never could endure the place? I foresaw, as plainly as I see you now, that one day I should be crouching here for safety with a hideous crime on my conscience. I told you so, Helen, at the time. Oh! how could you bring me here?”
He threw himself down again, and hid his face on her lap.
With a fresh inroad of dismay Helen thought he must be going mad, for this was the merest trick of his imagination. Certainly he had always dreaded the place, but never a word of that sort had he said to her. Yet there was a shadow of possible comfort in the thought—for, what if the whole thing should prove an hallucination! But whether real or not, she must have his story.
“Come, dearest Poldie, darling brother!” she said, “you have not yet told me what it is. What is the terrible thing you have done? I daresay it’s nothing so very bad after all!”
“There’s the light coming!” he said, in a dull hollow voice, “—The morning! always the morning coming again!”
“No, no, dear Poldie!” she returned. “There is no window here—at least it only looks on the back stair, high above heads; and the morning is a long way off.”
“How far?” he asked, staring in her eyes—“twenty years? That was just when I was born! Oh that I could enter a second time into my mother’s womb, and never be born! Why are we sent into this cursed world? I would God had never made it. What was the good? Couldn’t he have let well alone?”
He was silent. She must get him to sleep.
It was as if a second soul had been given her to supplement the first, and enable her to meet what would otherwise have been the exorbitant demands now made upon her. With an effort of the will such as she could never before have even imagined, she controlled the anguish of her own spirit, and, softly stroking the head of the poor lad, which had again sought her lap, compelled herself to sing him for lullaby a song of which in his childhood he had been very fond, and with which, in all the importance of imagined motherhood, she had often sung him to sleep. And the old influence was potent yet. In a few minutes the fingers which clutched her hand relaxed, and she knew by his breathing that he slept. She sat still as a stone, not daring to move, hardly daring breathe enough to keep her alive, lest she should rouse him from his few blessed moments of self-nothingness, during which the tide of the all-infolding ocean of peace was free to flow into the fire-torn cave of his bosom. She sat motionless thus, until it seemed as if for very weariness she must drop in a heap on the floor, but that the aches and pains which went through her in all directions held her body together like ties and rivets. She had never before known what weariness was, and now she knew it for all her life. But like an irritant, her worn body clung about her soul and dulled it to its own grief, thus helping it to a pitiful kind of repose. How long she sat thus she could not tell—she had no means of knowing, but it seemed hours on hours, and yet, though the nights were now short, the darkness had not begun to thin. But when she thought how little access the light had to that room, she began to grow uneasy lest she should be missed from her own, or seen on her way back to it. At length some involuntary movement woke him. He started to his feet with a look of wild gladness. But there was scarcely time to recognise it before it vanished.
“My God, it is true then!” he shrieked. “O Helen, I dreamed that I was innocent—that I had but dreamed I had done it. Tell me that I’m dreaming now. Tell me! tell me!—Tell me that I am no murderer!”
As he spoke, he seized her shoulder with a fierce grasp, and shook her as if trying to wake her from the silence of a lethargy.
“I hope you are innocent, my darling. But in any case I will do all I can to protect you,” said Helen. “Only I shall never be able unless you control yourself sufficiently to let me go home.”
“No, Helen!” he cried; “you must not leave me. If you do, I shall go mad. SHE will come instead.”
Helen shuddered inwardly, but kept her outward composure.
“If I stay with you, just think, dearest, what will happen,” she said. “I shall be missed, and all the country will be raised to look for me. They will think I have been—“—She checked herself.
“And so you might be—so might anyone,” he cried, “so long as I am loose—like the Rajah’s man-eating horse. O God! It has come to this!” And he hid his face in his hands.
“And then you see, my Poldie,” Helen went on as calmly as she could, “they would come here and find us; and I don’t know what might come next.”
“Yes, yes, Helen! Go, go directly. Leave me this instant,” he said, hurriedly, and took her by the shoulders, as if he would push her from the room, but went on talking. “It must be, I know; but when the light comes I shall go mad. Would to God I might, for the day is worse than the darkness; then I see my own black against the light. Now go, Helen. But you WILL come back to me as soon as ever you can? How shall I know when to begin to look for you? What o’clock is it? My watch has never been—since—. Ugh! the light will be here soon. Helen, I know now what hell is.—Ah! Yes.”—As he spoke he had been feeling in one of his pockets.—“I will not be taken alive.—Can you whistle, Helen?”
“Yes, Poldie,” answered Helen, trembling. “Don’t you remember teaching me?”
“Yes, yes.—Then, when you come near the house, whistle, and go on whistling, for if I hear a step without any whistling, I shall kill myself.”
“What have you got there?” she asked in renewed terror, noticing that he kept his hand in the breast pocket of his coat.
“Only the knife,” he answered calmly.
“Give it to me,” she said, calmly too.
He