The Final Shock

Her baby had fallen asleep. I knew this by the faint, low sweetness of her croon; and, shuddering with the horrors I had witnessed — horrors which acquired a double force from the contrast presented by the peace of this quiet spot and the hallowing influence of the sleeping infant — I threw myself down in the darkness at her feet, gasping out:

“Oh, thank God and your uncle’s seeming harshness that you have escaped the doom which has overtaken those others! You and your babe are still alive; while they ——”

“What of them? What has happened to them? You are breathless, trembling; you have brought no bread ——”

“No, no. Food in this house means death. Your relatives gave food and wine to your uncle at a supper; he, though now in his grave, has returned the same to them. There was a bottle ——”

I stopped, appalled. A shriek, muffled by distance but quivering with the same note of death I had heard before, had gone up again from the other side of the wall against which we were leaning.

“Oh!” she gasped, “and my father was at that supper! my father, who died last night cursing the day he was born! We are an accursed race! I have known it all my life. Perhaps that was why I mistook passion for love. And my baby — O God, have mercy! God, have mercy!”

The plaintiveness of that cry, the awesomeness of what I had seen — of what was going on at that moment almost within the reach of our arms — the darkness, the desolation of our two souls, affected me as I had never been affected in my whole life before. In the concentrated experience of the last two hours I seemed to have lived years under this woman’s eyes; to know her as I did my own heart; to love her as I did my own soul. No growth of feeling ever brought the ecstasy of that moment’s inspiration. With no sense of doing anything strange, with no fear of being misunderstood, I reached out my hand, and, touching hers where it lay clasped about her infant, I said:

“We are two poor wayfarers. A rough road loses half its difficulties when trodden by two. Shall we, then, fare on together — you, I, and the little child?”

She gave a sob; there was sorrow, longing, grief, hope in its thrilling, low sound. As I recognised the latter emotion I drew her to my breast. The child did not separate us.

“We shall be happy,” I murmured, and her sigh seemed to answer a delicious “Yes,” when suddenly there came a shock to the partition against which we leaned, and, starting from my clasp, she cried:

“Our duty is in there. Shall we think of ourselves, or even of each other, while these men, all relatives of mine, are dying on the other side of this wall?”

Seizing my hand, she dragged me to the trap; but here I took the lead and helped her down the ladder. When I had her safely on the floor at the foot she passed in front of me again; but once up the steps and in front of the kitchen door I thrust her behind me, for one glance into the room beyond had convinced me it was no place for her.

But she would not be held back. She crowded forward beside me, and together we looked upon the wreck within. It was a never-to-be-forgotten scene. The demon that was in those men had driven them to demolish furniture, dishes, everything. In one heap lay what, an hour before, had been an inviting board surrounded by rollicking and greedy guests. But it was not upon this overthrow we stopped to look. It was upon something that mingled with it, dominated it, and made of this chaos only a setting to awful death. Janet’s face, in all its natural hideousness and depravity, looked up from the floor beside this heap; and farther on, lay the twisted figure of him they called Hector, with something more than the seams of greedy longing round his wide-staring eyes and icy temples. Two in this room! and on the threshold of the one beyond a moaning third, who sank into eternal silence as we approached; and before the fireplace in the great room a horrible crescent that had once been aged Luke, upon whom we had no sooner turned our backs than we caught glimpses here and there of other prostrate forms which moved once under our eyes and then moved no more.

One only still stood upright, and he was the man whose obtrusive figure and sordid expression had so revolted me in the beginning. There was no colour now in his flabby and heavily fallen cheeks. The eyes, in whose false shee............