Part 55 (1/2)

The wash of the sea came murmurously through the September silence.

His restless eyes flashed hither and thither over the quiet scene, taking in every detail, lingering nowhere. The pine trees stirred in the distance below him, seeming to whisper together, and an owl hooted with a weird persistence down by the lake. It was like the calling of a human voice--almost like a cry of distress. Then it ceased, and the trees were still again.

The spell of the silence fell like the falling of a curtain. The loneliness crept about his heart.

He took the cigar from his mouth and spoke, ironically, grimly.

”There is your kingdom, Charles Rex!” he said.

He turned with the words and leaped down upon the narrow walk between the battlements. The owl began to call again, but the desolation remained. He paced forward with his hands behind him, his head bent. No one could see him here. The garment of mockery could be flung aside. He was like a prisoner tramping the stone walls from which he could never escape.

He paused once to toss away his cigar, but he did not look out again over the fair prospect of his lands. He was looking at other things, seeing the vast emptiness of a life that had never been worth while stretching behind and before him. Like a solitary traveller pausing in the heart of the desert, he stood to view the barrenness around him.

He had travelled far, had pursued many a quest with ardour; but the ardour had all gone out of him now. Only the empty solitude remained. He had lived a life of fevered variety, he had drunk deep of many waters; but he had never been satisfied. And now it seemed to him that all he had ever looked upon, all he had ever achieved, was mirage. Nothing of all that he had ever striven for was left. The fruit had turned to ashes in his mouth, and no spring remained whereat to quench his thirst.

Perhaps few men have ever realized the utter waste of wickedness as Charles Rex realized it that night. He met it whichever way he turned. To gratify the moment's whim had ever been his easy habit. If a generous impulse had moved him, he had gratified that also. But it had never been his way to sacrifice himself--until a certain night when a child had come to him, wide-eyed and palpitating like a driven bird, and had sought shelter and protection at his hands.

That, very curiously, had been the beginning of a new era in his life. It had appealed to him as nothing had ever appealed before. He had never tasted--or even desired--the Dead Sea fruit again. Something had entered his being on that night which he had never been able to cast out, and all other things had been dwarfed to insignificance.

He faced the fact as he paced his castle walls. The relish had gone out of his life. He was gathering what he had sown, and the harvest was barren indeed.

Time pa.s.sed; he walked unheeding. If he spent the whole night on the ramparts, there was no one to know or care. It was better than tossing sleepless under a roof. He felt as if a roof would suffocate him. But sheer physical weariness began to oppress even his elastic frame at last.

He awoke to the fact that he was dead tired.

He sat down in an embrasure between the battlements, and drifted into the numb state between waking and sleeping in which visions are born. For a s.p.a.ce nothing happened, then quite suddenly, rising as it were out of a void, a presence entered his consciousness, reached and touched his spirit. Intangibly, but quite unmistakably, he was aware of the summons, of a voice that spoke within his soul.

He lifted his head and looked about him. Emptiness, stark emptiness, was all he saw. Yet, in a moment, as though a hand had beckoned, he arose.

Without a backward glance he traversed the distance that lay between him and the turret-door. He went through it into utter darkness, and in utter darkness began the descent.

A shaft of moonlight smote through a slit in the stone wall as he rounded the corner of the stair. It lay like a s.h.i.+ning sword across his path, and for a second he paused. Then he pa.s.sed over it, sure-footed and confident, and plunged again into darkness. When he reached the end of the descent, he was breathing heavily, and his eyes were alight with a strange fire. He pulled upon the door and put aside the thick curtain with the swift movements of a man who can brook no delay. He pa.s.sed into the long, dim room beyond with its single red lamp burning at the far end. He prepared to pa.s.s on to the door that led out upon the gallery and so to the grand staircase. But before he had gone half-a-dozen paces he stopped. It was no sound that arrested, no visible circ.u.mstance of any sort. Yet, as if at a word of command, he halted. His quick look swept around the room like the gleam of a rapier, and suddenly he swung upon his heel, facing that still, red light.

Seconds pa.s.sed before he moved again. Then swiftly and silently he walked up the room. Close to the lamp was a deep settee on which the spots of a leopard skin showed in weird relief. At one end of the settee, against the leopard skin, something gold was s.h.i.+ning. Saltash's look was fixed upon it as he drew near.

He reached the settee treading noiselessly. He stood beside it, looking down. And over his dark face with its weary lines and cynical mouth, its melancholy and its bitterness, there came a light such as neither man nor woman had ever seen upon it before. For there before him, curled up like a tired puppy, her tumbled, golden hair lying in ringlets over the leopard skin, was Toby, asleep in the dim, red lamplight.

For minutes he stood and gazed upon her before she awoke. For minutes that strange glory came and went over his watching face. He did not stir, did not seem even to breathe. But the fact of his presence must have pierced her consciousness at last, for in the end quite quietly, supremely naturally, the blue eyes opened and fixed upon him.

”Hullo!” said Toby sleepily. ”Time to get up?”

And then, in a moment, she had sprung upright on the couch, swift dismay on her face.

”I--I thought we were on the yacht! I--I--I never meant to go to sleep here! I came to speak to you, sir. I wanted to see you.”

He put a restraining hand upon her thin young shoulder, and his touch vibrated as with some unknown force controlled.

”All right, Nonette!” he said, and his voice had the same quality; it was rea.s.suring but oddly unsteady. ”Sorry I kept you waiting.”

She looked at him. Her face was quivering. ”I've had--a h.e.l.l of a time,”

she said pathetically. ”Been here hours--thought you'd never come. Your man--your man said I wasn't to disturb you.”

”d.a.m.n the fool!” said Saltash.