Part 4 (1/2)
Without more ado Anstice complied.
”Miss Ryder made me promise that if the sun should rise before any help came to us I would shoot her with my own hand so that she should not have to face death--or worse--at the hands of our enemies.”
”You thought it might be--worse?”
”Yes. My father was a doctor in China at the time of the Boxer rising,”
said Anstice with apparent irrelevance. ”And as a boy I heard stories of--of atrocities to women--which haunted me for years. On my soul, Cheniston”--he spoke with a sincerity which the other man could not question--”I was ready--no, glad, to do Miss Ryder the service she asked me.”
Twice Cheniston tried to speak, and twice his dry lips refused their office. At last he conquered his weakness.
”You waited till the sun rose ... and then ... you were sure ... you did not doubt that the moment had come?”
”No. I waited as long as I dared ... the sun had risen and we heard the clamour in the courtyard outside....”
”And so----” Again his parched lips would not obey his bidding.
”When the men were at the very door of the hut I carried out my promise,” said Anstice steadily. ”She closed her eyes ... I told her to, so that she should not be afraid to see death coming ... and then ...”
at the recollection of that last poignant moment a slow shudder shook him from head to foot, ”... it was all over in a second. She did not suffer--of that, at least, you may be certain.”
Cheniston's hand was over his eyes; and for a s.p.a.ce the room was very still.
Then:
”And you--you went out, as you thought, to meet your own death?”
”Yes--and I wish to G.o.d I'd met it,” said Anstice with an uncontrollable outburst of bitterness. ”I endured the shame, the horror of it all in vain. You know what happened ... how just as the men were about to fire the rescuers burst into the courtyard.... My G.o.d, why were they so late!
Or, being late, why did they come at all!”
Cheniston's blue eyes, which had been full of a natural human anguish, grew suddenly hard.
”You are not particularly grateful to your rescuers,” he said. ”Yet if they had been a few minutes later, you too would have been beyond their help.”
Anstice was quick to notice the renewed hostility in the young man's tone.
”Just so.” His manner, too, had changed. ”But can you expect me to feel a very vivid grat.i.tude to the men who restored my life to me, seeing with what memories that life must always be haunted?”
”Need you endure the haunting of those memories?”
The question, spoken quietly, yet with an obvious significance, took Anstice aback. For a moment he frowned, his dazed mind fumbling after the speaker's meaning.
”_Need_ I?” Suddenly he knew what Cheniston had meant to imply. ”Ah--you mean a man may always determine the length of his days?”
Cheniston nodded, never taking his eyes off the other's face.
”I see. Well, suicide would be a way out, of course. But”--for a second his eyes hardened, grew stern--”I don't mean to take that way--unless life grows too much for me. A second--mistake”--he spoke slowly--”would not annul the first.”
”No.” Cheniston's face had lost all its boyishness; it looked haggard, unhappy, old. ”Possibly not. But when one has made a mistake of so tragic a nature I should have thought one would have been only too ready to pay the price of one's miscalculation.”
For a second Anstice stared at him silently.
”Just so,” he said at last, very quietly, taking his hands out of his pockets for the first time. ”The question is, What is the price? And do you really think that to repudiate a debt by running away from one's creditor, so to speak, is as satisfactory a settlement as to pay it coin by coin, each coin drawn from one's own heart's blood?”