The Silent Shore
Text"Will you yield, assassin, villain?" Guffanta muttered.
"Never! Do your worst."
He felt one hand tighten round his throat more strongly, he felt the other arm of the Spaniard driving him back; in that moment of supreme agony he heard the breaking of the railing and felt it give under him, and then Guffanta's hands had loosed him, and, striking the moraine with his head, he fell down and down till he lay a senseless mass upon the white bosom of the glacier.
And Guffanta standing above, with his head bared to the stars and to the waning moon, exclaimed, as he lifted his hand to the heavens, "Walter, you are avenged."
The day dawned upon the plateau; a few struggling rays of the sun illuminated the great glacier above and turned its dead gray snow and ice into a pure, warm white, while the mists rolled away from the high mountains keeping watch above; and below on the smaller glacier, and at the edge of a yawning crevasse, lay the body of Philip Smerdon.
Two guides, proceeding over the pass to meet a party of mountain climbers, reached the plateau at dawn, and sitting down upon the stone to eat a piece of bread and take a draught of cold coffee, saw his knapsack lying beside it.
"What does it mean?" the one said to the other.
"It means death," his companion replied, "the railing is broken! Some one has fallen."
Slowly and carefully, and each holding to one of the upright posts, they peered over and down on to the glacier, and there they saw what was lying below. A whispered word sufficed, a direction given by one to the other, and these hardy mountaineers were descending the moraine, digging their sticks deeply into the stones, and gradually working their way skilfully to the glacier.
"Is he dead, Carl?" the one asked of his friend, who stooped over the prostrate form and felt his heart.
"No; he lives. Mein Gott! how has he ever fallen here without instant death? But he must die! See, his bones are all broken!" and as he spoke he lifted Smerdon's arm and touched one of his legs.
"What shall we do with him?" the other asked.
"We must remove him. Even though he die on the way, it is better than to leave him here. Let us take him to the house of Father Neümann. It is but to the foot of the glacier."
Very gently these men lifted him in their arms, though not so gently but that they wrung a groan of agony from him as they did so, and bore him down the glacier to where it entered the valley; and then, having handed him to the priest, who lived in what was little better than a hut, they left him.
Late that afternoon the dying man opened his eyes, and looked round the room in which he lay. At his bedside he saw a table with a Cross laid upon it, and at the window of the room an aged priest sat reading a Breviary. "Where am I?" he asked in English.
The priest rose and came to the bed, and then spoke to him in German. "My son," he said, "what want of yours can I supply?"
"Tell me where I am," Smerdon answered in the same language, "and how long I have to live."
"You are in my house, the house of the Curé of Sastratz. For the span of your life none can answer but God. But, my son, I should do ill if I did not tell you that your hours are numbered. The doctor from St. Christoph has seen you."
"Give me paper and ink-"
"My son, you cannot write, and-"
"I will write," Smerdon said faintly, "even though I die in the attempt."
The Curé felt his right arm, which was not broken like the other, and then he brought him paper and ink, and holding the former up on his Breviary before the dying man, he put the pen in his hand. And slowly and painfully, and with eyes that occasionally closed, Smerdon wrote:
"I am dying at the house of the Curé of Sastratz, near the Schwarzweiss Pass; from a fall. Tell Gervase that I alone murdered Walter Crandall. If he will come to me and I am still alive, I will tell him all.
"Philip Smerdon."
Then he put the letter in an envelope and addressed it to Ida Raughton. And ere he once more lapsed into unconsciousness, he asked the priest to write another for him to his mother, and to address it to an hotel at Zurich.
"They will be sent at once?" he asked faintly.
"Surely, my son."
CHAPTER XXI
It was late on the evening of the fifth day after the letter had been sent to Ida Raughton, that a mule, bearing upon its back Lord Penlyn and escorted by a guide, stopped at the house of the Curé of Sastratz; The young man had travelled from London as fast as the expresses could carry him, and had come straight to the village lying at the entrance of the Schwarzweiss Pass, to find that from there he could only continue his journey on foot or by mule. He chose the latter as the swiftest and easiest course-for he was very tired and worn with travelling-and at last he arrived at his destination.
When the first feeling of horror had been upon him on reading the letter Smerdon had written, acknowledging that he was the murderer, he had told Ida Raughton that he would not go to see him even on his death-bed; that his revulsion of feeling would be such that he should be only able to curse him for his crime. But she, with that gentleness of heart that never failed her, pleaded so with him to have pity on the man who, however deep his sin, had sinned alone for him, that she induced him to go.
"Remember," she said, "that even though he has done this awful deed, he did it for your sake; it was not done to benefit himself. Bad and wicked as it was, at least that can be pleaded for him."
"Yes," her lover answered, "I see his reason now. He thought that Walter had come between my happiness and me for ever, and in a moment of pity for me he did the deed. How little he knew me, if he thought I wished him dead!"
But even as he spoke he remembered that he had once cursed his brother, and had used the very words "I wish he were dead!" If it was upon this hasty expression that Smerdon had acted, then he, too, was a murderer.
He left Belmont an hour after the letter had arrived, and so, travelling as above described, stood outside Father Neümann's house on the night of the fifth day. The priest answered the door himself, and as he did so he put his finger upon his lip. "Are you the friend from England that is expected?" he asked.
"Yes," Penlyn said, speaking low in answer to the sign for silence. "He still lives?"
"He lives; but his hours draw to a close. Had you not come now you would not have found him alive."
"Let me see him at once."
"Come. His mother is with him."
He followed the Curé into a room sparsely furnished, and of unpolished pine-wood; a room on which there was no carpet and but little furniture; and there he saw the dying form of Philip Smerdon. Kneeling by the bedside, and praying while she sobbed bitterly, was a lady whom Lord Penlyn knew to be Smerdon's mother. She rose at his entrance, and brushed the tears from her eyes.
"You have come in time to see him die," she said, while her frame was convulsed with sobs. "He has been expecting you. He said he could not pass away until he had seen you."
Penlyn said some words of consolation to her, and then he asked:
"Is he conscious?"
The poor mother leant over the bed and spoke to him, and he opened his eyes.
"Your friend has come, Philip," she said.
A light came into his eyes as he saw Penlyn standing before him, and then in a hollow voice he asked her to leave them alone.
"I have something to say to him," he said; "and the time is short."
"Yes," he said when she was gone, and speaking faintly in answer to Penlyn, who said he had come as quickly as possible; "yes, I know it. I expected you. And now that you are here can you bring yourself to say that you forgive me?"
For one moment the other hesitated, then he said: "I forgive you. May God do so likewise."
"Ah! that is it-it is that that makes death terrible! But listen! I must speak at once, I have but a short time more. This is my last hour, I feel it, I know it."
"Do not distress yourself with speaking. Do not think of it now."
"Not think of it! When have I ever forgotten it! Come closer, listen. I thought he had come between you and Miss Raughton for ever. I never dreamed of the magnanimity he showed in that letter. Then I determined to kill him-I thought I could do it without it being known. I did not go to the 'Chase' on that morning, but, instead, tracked him from one place to another, disguised in a suit of workman's clothes that I had bought some time ago for a fancy dress ball. I thought he would never leave his club that night; but at last he came out, and then-then-God! I grow weaker! – I did it."
Penlyn buried his head in his hands as he listened to this recital, and once he made a sign as though begging Smerdon to stop, but he did not heed him.
"I had with me a dagger I bought at Tunis, a long, sharp knife of the kind used by the Arabs, and I loosened it from its sheath as we entered the Park, he walking a few steps ahead of me, and, evidently, thinking deeply. Between the lamps I quickened my pace and passed him, and then, turning round suddenly, I seized him by the coat and stabbed him to the heart. It was but the work of a moment and he fell instantly, exclaiming only as he did so, 'Murderer!' Then to give it the appearance of a murder committed for theft, I stooped over him and wrenched his watch away, and as I took it I saw that he was dead. The watch is at Occleve Chase, in the lowest drawer of my writing-desk."
"Tell me no more," Penlyn said, "tell me no more."
"There is no more-only this, that I am glad to die. My life has been a curse since that day, I am thankful it is at an end. Had Guffanta not hurled me on to the glacier below, I think I must have taken it with my own hands."
"Guffanta!" Penlyn exclaimed, "is it he then who has done this?"
"It is he! He followed me from England here-in some strange way he was a witness to the murder-we met upon the pass and fought, he taxing me with being a murderer and a thief, and-and-ah! this is the end!"
His eyes closed, and Penlyn saw that his last moment was at hand. He called gently to Mrs. Smerdon, and she came in, and throwing herself by the side of the bed, took his hand and kissed it as she wept. The Curé entered at the same time and bent over him, and taking the Crucifix from his side, held it up before his eyes. Once they were fixed upon Penlyn with an imploring glance, and once they rested on his mother, and then they closed for ever.
"He is dead!" the priest said, "let us pray for the repose of his soul."
It was a few days afterwards that Ida Raughton, when walking up and down the paths at Belmont, heard the sound of carriage-wheels in the road outside, and knew that her lover was coming back to her. He had written from Switzerland saying that Smerdon was dead, and that he should wait to see him buried in the churchyard of St. Christoph-where many other English lay who had perished in the mountains-and he had that morning telegraphed from Paris to tell her that he was coming by the mail, and should be with her in the evening.
She walked swiftly to the house to meet him, but before she could reach it, he had come through the French windows of the morning-room, and advanced towards her.
"You have heard that he is dead, Ida?" he said, when he had kissed her, "it only remains for me to tell you that he died penitent and regretting his crime. It had weighed heavily upon him, and he was glad to go."
"And you forgave him, Gervase?" she asked.
"Yes. I forgave him. I could not but remember-as I saw him stretched there crushed and dying-that, though he had robbed me of a brother whom I must have come to love, he had sinned for me. Yes, if forgiveness belonged to me, I forgave him."
"Until we meet that brother in another world, Gervase, we have nothing but his memory to cherish. We must never forget his noble character."
"It shall be my constant thought," Penlyn answered, "to shape my life to what he would have wished it to be. And, Ida, so long as I live, his memory shall be second only in my heart to your own sweet self. Come, darling, it is growing late let us go in."