Part 51 (1/2)
The Rider of Waroona was dead!
With bowed head and aching heart Durham bent over her.
All the love of his nature which had lain dormant for so long had gone out to this woman, enfolding her, idealising her, until she became to him the completement of his being, the one incentive for all which was n.o.ble within him, the mainspring of his life, the lode-stone of his ambitions. To have won her would have been his dearest and proudest achievement; to have had her love would have made existence for him a never-ending stream of happiness and joy.
As a sun new risen from the night she had come into his life, bringing light and warmth and peace where there had been only coldness and unrest. So he had dreamed of her only that morning; so she had appeared to him only a few hours since when, at her bidding, trusting her, believing in her, loving her, he had turned his back on his duty--betrayed.
Resentment at the treachery warred with his love and tinged his sorrow with bitterness. How she had played with him, tricking him, fooling him, outwitting him--and yet loving him.
The memory of the last fond look of lingering tenderness which had been in her eyes ere he told her Dudgeon was dead came to him. Why had he told her that? Why had he not let her die as she was then, with the gentle side of her nature dominating her, filled with the one soft impulse she perhaps had ever known?
The words had slipped from his tongue almost before he knew, and on the instant there had come back to her the overshadowing influence which had warped her life for evil even before she was born.
By his hand she had died; by his words her last moments had been filled with the blackness of insensate hate.
Before the mute condemnation of that self-accusing thought the bitterness which had been in his mind against her dissipated. Whatever ills she had done to him, he had done greater to her. Whatever ills she had done to humanity were the outcome not of her own nature, but of the circ.u.mstances and conditions which had governed her from the moment she was born. All that she had said during the last evening he spent at her house recurred to him and a new significance dawned into the words.
She had spoken of herself, pleaded for herself, striven to rouse his sympathy and compa.s.sion, so that, within the sombre barrenness of her ill-starred life, one spot there might be where the loving kindness of human charity had fallen and made it bright. He remembered how he had answered her--coldly, sternly, crus.h.i.+ng down her awakening soul with the same callous indifference which had always met her. With the pitiless weight of a loveless life, what wonder she was warped, distorted, marred? More sinned against than sinning, he had no right nor will to blame her--only the love she had inspired in him remained, to fill his heart with sadness and drag it down with the hopeless desolation of vain regrets.
For she had gone from him even as she revealed the love she bore him, gone into the darkness by his own act, gone--his throat grew hard until he choked as the thought came to him--gone from a greater degradation he, by the merciless irony of fate, would have had to fasten upon her.
Better, a thousand times better for her, that she should be as she was than that she should have lived to face the doom awaiting her--better for her--and better for him.
It was nothing to him now that the story she had told showed her, by all the laws of humanity, to be unworthy. Black as she had painted herself, the love she had inspired shone through the blackness, revealing only that which lay beyond, the radiant purpose, unmeasurable by human standards, transcending human ken.
He knelt again by her side, taking her cold hands in his and placing them upon her breast, closing the staring eyes, composing the wry-drooped mouth, straightening the twisted limbs.
”Oh, my love, my love,” he wailed. ”Sleep on in peace. Sleep on till I shall come to you. Wait for me, for I must stay awhile yet to s.h.i.+eld and shelter you so that none may know the secret of your life.”
CHAPTER XIX
THE ASHES OF SILENCE
Wallace and Harding were seeing all was secure in the bank before retiring for the night when a sharp rap sounded at the front door.
”Hullo, what's this?” Wallace exclaimed. ”Will you see who it is?”
Harding went to the door and opened it. On the step Durham was standing.
”Oh, it's you, Durham. Come in,” he said. ”We've been discussing things or we should have been in bed an hour or more ago. What's the news?”
Without a word Durham stepped in and walked to the room where Wallace was waiting at the door. Directly he came into the light both Harding and Wallace uttered exclamations of surprise.
”Why, what has happened?” the latter cried. ”My dear fellow--you look thoroughly done up--you are as haggard as a man of sixty. You've overdone it. Let me get you a whisky.”
Durham shook his head and sat down, resting one hand on the table at his side, the other on his knee. His uniform was soiled and torn, his face lined and grey, and his eyes heavy as with a great weariness. The quick alertness he had shown when he was with them earlier in the day had gone; he looked, as Wallace had expressed it, an old, haggard man, listless, without vitality, lacking even the energy to talk.
The two stood watching him in silence, the same question in each one's mind--what could have happened to produce so great a change in a man in so short a time?